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Christine is in the waiting room, explaining a subdural hematoma to a patient’s husband, when it happens.
There’s a rustling sound, faint like wind through the trees, and then a teenaged girl is standing a few feet away, her expression wide-eyed with shock as she materializes.
“Mom?” she says, looking around. “Where’s my mom?”
They start popping up in earnest, then, dust materializing and consolidating out of thin air, people screaming, people crying, people tripping over one another amongst the chairs. Metro General hasn’t had a crowd like this in years.
A slightly frantic voice calls over the intercom while Christine attempts to place the girl’s mother, who she insists is in surgery now, a car crash victim. It’s Elena, the charge nurse on duty, paging her. “Dr. Palmer. Dr. Palmer to suite 1.”
There’s a man on the floor in the OR, his chest wide open, struggling back from anesthesia that was given to him five years ago. Esteban De Leon; Christine remembers him vividly. Kind of hard to forget the face of the man who dissolved with your hands in his thoracic cavity.
They barely stabilize Esteban, but there’s no time to figure out what’s going on; another patient has materialized in the hallway and ripped all her sutures falling to the floor—a patient whose stitches should’ve come out long ago. After that, they start coming in heavy—car crashes, mostly, both pedestrians who were struck and drivers who tried to swerve to avoid them. Two die on the table in the span of a few hours; four live. Nic West turns up in the breakroom, confused and asking after his girlfriend, but he’s better than nothing.
She’s at the hospital for 17 more hours before enough relief shows up—doctors and nurses trickling in with stunned looks on their faces, stammering about their spouses, their children, materializing out of thin air like they’d never left. Christine hasn’t had a moment to think since this happened—since whatever happened, or un-happened—and she can hardly allow herself to do it now. All the ORs are full; the waiting room is cacophonous, even from here. It’s madness. Or a miracle.
Her friend Claire. Her cousin Laura. Her brother-in-law, Ray. Her old neighbor, Jason, and his two kids—his wife moved after the blip; Christine hadn’t gotten her number before she left. Are they all back? Is everyone? Is—
“Christine,” Nic says, finding her at the nurse’s station, pacing and clutching a clipboard. He called his girlfriend a few hours ago—ex-girlfriend, now, Christine assumes, since she’d overheard a portion of the tearful call. He seems to be holding up about as well as any of them. “Get out of here. Go.”
It’s not like she needed permission—she should’ve been gone hours ago. But maybe she needed a push.
“You, too,” she says, and tosses the clipboard on the desk. He nods.
She’s pushing out of the double doors to the trauma unit within minutes.
The streets are a mess. The cops are out in droves—some of them, Christine thinks, must’ve been blipped themselves, must’ve reappeared in cruisers, wondering if they’d fallen asleep on the job, had a strange dream. People are crying on the sidewalks—tears of joy, tears of anguish, tears of confusion. Christine sympathizes, but she doesn’t linger.
Ordinarily she’d take the subway home, but that seems unwise, even given the chaos on the streets and the late hour; she walks, though her feet ache in a way no Dr. Scholl’s insert could ever stand a chance against. She wants a shower and the leftover pho in her fridge, not necessarily in that order. She wants to go to bed and wake up to a world that makes sense again—to wake up five or six years ago, really, maybe longer. She wants—
The front door to her apartment is locked, but she knows even before opening the door that something is off. Or, more accurately, something is on—her stereo, her last holdover against the intrusion of Bluetooth. The system was a gift, a very nice one, many years ago.
Phil Collins is playing—”In the Air Tonight,” of all things. Stephen could probably tell her everything about the song, down to the exact runtime and the name of the guy who cleaned the studio after it was recorded. Stephen could probably—
“I’m sorry,” a low, drawling voice says from the living room, out of sight from where she stands in the foyer. “I didn’t want to frighten you.”
She drops her bag on the floor with a heavy thud and moves farther into the apartment, stumbling, but not from exhaustion or pain. She comes to a stop near the bar stools, both of them unusable at present, each seat buried under stacks of mail and stray coats and bags, the detritus of an ER doc’s life.
Stephen is sitting—hovering, actually—on her couch, his legs crossed criss-cross applesauce. He used to chide her when she sat like that on the couch, prodding at her thighs on the rare occasions when he could be coerced to sit still and shut up long enough to eat or watch something on TV. Bad for your pelvic alignment. What, do you like your chiropractor bill?
“Stephen,” she says, dumbly.
“Christine,” he says, watching her as he sinks to rest on the couch and then slowly gets to his feet. Then, inanely, he comments, “You changed your hair.”
Her hair—her bun was so tight that she had to take it out on the walk home. It hangs just barely to her shoulders like a messy, tangled cloud. Her temples ache dully. She barely passed the Poetics class she took in undergrad, but the only way she could possibly describe how she feels right now would be bruised, tender and overwarm.
Christine licks her bottom lip, trying to gather herself. “I’m sure you’re dying to share your opinion on it.”
“Pretty,” he says, which is better than the I hadn’t noticed he gave her the time she got a balayage treatment. He looks the same, which doesn’t surprise her—so had Esteban. There’s bruising on his cheekbone. He’s at least spared the drama of his strange robes, no pun intended; he’s wearing sweats, a plain gray t-shirt, and sneakers. She almost overlooks his fucking cloak, hanging in the corner, sans coatrack.
They’re both just standing there. Stephen looks guarded, which isn’t unusual; he’s watching her closely, studying her like she’s a particularly fascinating EEG. Her brain can’t be all that interesting right now; it’s moving sluggishly, numb with disbelief.
“How long have you been here?” she asks. Her voice is so hoarse she’s surprised he can hear her over the music. Thank God she didn’t sell this place, move closer to home like she once considered—but then, he would’ve found her, easily.
“Just over an hour,” he says, reaching up to rub the back of his neck, an extremely rare gesture. He’s nervous. “I’ve been meditating. I knew you had to be at the hospital. I’m sorry about the music, I wasn’t sure exactly when you’d be home or I would’ve—picked something else.”
She can feel delirium setting in, a delayed reaction. “What, mood music?”
“Something without a drum solo,” he says dryly.
She laughs, a high, crystalline sound, easily shattered; she keeps laughing, and then suddenly, without her consent, her face is crumpling. “You asshole,” she sobs. “You asshole, you—”
“Oh, Christine,” he says, “Jesus,” but he’s moving towards her, crossing the ten feet between them in a few long strides. Much better than the time she cried in front of him after a difficult shift and he practically broke his neck trying to get out of the room.
He grabs her shoulders first, as if allowing her the opportunity to reject the embrace before it comes, but she falls against his chest, his solid, miraculously whole chest, and weeps.
She forgoes the shower for now, but that reheated pho won’t wait. Stephen sips a cup of tea at the other end of the couch while she eats, a bag of chamomile that he must’ve filched from her pantry. He’s using a mug she won in a charity raffle from the hospital gift shop.
“Is that from Mo’ Pho?” he asks, watching her slurp broth with barely disguised amusement.
“No,” she says. “They closed about two years ago. It’s a taco place now.”
“Ah,” he says.
He liked Mo’ Pho, although he mocked the name with abandon. She can see that this information doesn’t quite discombobulate him, as it would have anyone else who’d just come back from the dead after half a decade, but it does sober him somewhat.
Every time she went to Mo’ Pho after the blip she thought of him—of breakroom meals, or of him bringing takeout to her apartment, his idea of romantic behavior being to feed them both his favorite food after a long day. It was never her favorite, but she’d teared up reading the closure notice in the window all the same.
She finishes the last of the soup, then takes a long, greedy drink of water. He’s still watching her, his eyes silvery with the apartment lit only by accent lighting. It’s getting a little annoying, honestly. She’s not the one who might disappear at any moment.
“So,” she says, finally feeling stable enough to behave rationally. She’d wept so long and so hard that she’s probably wrecked her voice for a few hours, if not longer. There’s still a wet stain near his collarbone, tears and slobber from her sobbing mouth and probably even some snot. He’s been gracious enough not to complain about it thus far.
“So,” he intones, clasping the mug between two scarred hands. The tea has somehow remained steaming hot since she walked in. “Should I start at the beginning?”
“You’re nothing if not thorough,” she says, crossing her legs and settling in.
It takes him an hour to explain his involvement in the whole thing, even though she tries not to ask questions, preferring instead to let the mystic shit alone. She only stops him once in the middle of it.
“So you knew?” she asks. “You knew what was coming?”
“I knew what was inevitable,” he says, his gaze flicking away from the middle distance to meet hers. He’s been drifting for a while now, his words coming automatically. “Thanos would’ve razed Earth, the whole universe, in pursuit of those stones; the long game was our only chance.”
“You sacrificed yourself,” she says, almost a judgment. “You sacrificed everyone.”
He holds her gaze. “As I said—the inevitable.”
Finally he comes to Tony Stark’s death, and this seems to give him pause, but only briefly. Sacrifice; the inevitable. Then he looks at her expectantly.
“What?” she says. An ambulance passes by outside, wailing in shrill panic, and she can’t help but think of the GSW or crash victim within. “It’s—a lot to take in.”
“I’m sure,” he says. “Talk to me about something else. About you. The last five years.”
She gives him a look; it’s difficult to resist the knee-jerk, the urge to say, asking about me? Today’s full of surprises! It’s not fair, but she never had a real chance to get comfortable with this Stephen, the Stephen who wears cloaks and handspun fabrics and who remembers, occasionally, that other people have feelings, not just lumps of meat between the ears. Before the blip, they’d only just been—cobbling something back together, taking it painfully slow at her request, sharing only stolen evenings when she wasn’t elbow deep in a trauma patient and he wasn’t—well, wherever he always went, doing whatever he was doing. Reading ancient books, she thinks, for the most part. He always was a know-it-all. And then he died.
“I haven’t been snooping,” Stephen says, possibly misreading her glance.
“Definitely not something a snoop would say,” Christine says, and he smiles briefly.
There’s a beat of quiet. No other thing for it but to say it. “My dad passed away,” she says. “Not in the event. Lymphoma. Eighteen months ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Stephen says. He shifts slightly, almost imperceptibly, as if he might reach for her. He doesn’t, but something lurches in her chest, a fleeting hope that he might.
“There isn’t much else to say,” she says. “My siblings made it. My nieces, too. Things were hell at work for a while, but—things are always hell at work.”
“I don’t just want to hear who you lost,” Stephen prompts, with uncharacteristic tact.
She sighs. “Are you asking if I gained anyone, then?” she asks. “I thought about getting a cat.”
His brow furrows, reminding her briefly of a child trying to remember skimmed-over material, only missing the tongue poking out between the teeth. “Aren’t you allergic to—animals?”
“Cats, yes,” she says, “hence the decision not to get one.” She doesn’t have enough time for a dog.
“Christine.”
“I dated, sure,” she says. “One guy for a whole year. It didn’t work out.”
“Why not?” he asks. “Let me guess—cat person.”
She gives him a wry look. “His wife got blipped,” she says flatly. “He accidentally called me by her name one morning, and he could never look me in the eyes again.”
Hey, Ang, Mark had said, so casually, probably about to ask her to pass him the sugar for his coffee; the memory stings even now, albeit faintly. It wasn’t his fault, of course, and she’d assured him of that even then—grief is a funny thing. Still, she’d never called him Stephen.
Maybe because he had reminded her absolutely nothing of Stephen, which her therapist had suggested might’ve been a subconscious choice.
Stephen has the good grace to wince slightly. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“I think you’ve apologized more in the last hour than you have as long as I’ve known you,” she says. “Maybe more than in your entire life.”
He gives her a sly look. “I wouldn’t get used to it.”
She grins, then softens despite herself. “You haven’t done anything wrong, you know,” she says. “You saved the world. The universe.”
“I helped save it,” he says, his expression sobering as he looks askance at her. “But your ordeal—everyone’s ordeal—it must’ve been difficult.”
“Difficult” doesn’t begin to cover it. Christine studies him now, the raised scars on his fingers, his pointed chin, the streaks of gray at his temples that are weirdly sexy even now, when her nose is still stuffed up from crying harder than she’s cried since her father died. She’s aged, while he’s stayed the same; she’s older than him now by almost two years.
“Nobody told me you’d died,” she says quietly. “I—I had hoped—”
“Wong,” Stephen says. “He’s the only one who would’ve known to look for you, and he got snapped, too.”
She nods. “Well,” she says. “Anyway. I knew you were gone, eventually.”
He swallows hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his long throat. He doesn’t say anything to this, but he lets go of the mug with one hand when she reaches for him. He twines their fingers together, and she holds onto him tightly enough that she can feel the faint tremor under his skin, running through him like a living current.
She doesn’t remember falling asleep on the couch, nor does she remember getting up and getting ready for bed; only after she’s woken in the middle of the night, confused by her surroundings, does she begin to suspect Stephen might’ve magicked her here when she dozed off, into her pajamas and under the covers. He’s picked pajamas she never wears, a silky pink camisole and matching shorts, but he at least thought to get rid of her bra. How kind of him.
It’s blessedly dark in her room thanks to the blackout curtains, and she’s not interested enough in the time to roll over and check the clock on her bedside table. After a few moments, she realizes what must’ve woken her—movement in the bathroom, the sound of the old pipes screeching as someone turns off the shower spray. A moment later, the door opens and Stephen emerges in a faint cloud of steam, backlit.
Even squinting in the semi-darkness, she can see him well enough to track beads of water sliding down his chest. Something shifts in her chest again, less painfully this time, and she begins to rouse a little more, though she stays bundled in the warmth of the blankets. She’s slept; that means none of this has been a dream, right?
“Stephen,” she says, her voice less sleepy-sexy and more desiccated husk.
“Ah,” he says, stilling in the doorway. “Did I wake you?”
Clearly. “When’s the last time you slept?” she asks.
He huffs softly, then doesn’t flinch as clothes materialize on his body, a variation of the comfy outfit he’d had on earlier, minus the shoes. At least it’s not his robes—that would signal that he was about to leave. The towel disappears, hopefully not lost to the shadow realm or wherever the hell. “I’m alright, Christine. Go back to sleep.”
“Come to bed,” she says, and she can’t see his eyes very well in this light but she can feel him watching her, taking her in.
He smells like her, she realizes once he gets close, joining her in the bed with careful movements as though afraid to jostle her. Like her special body wash, the really nice one that smells like ylang ylang and white tea. Hand-woven threads or not, he still has expensive taste.
“Did you leave?” she whispers, following a hunch. She hasn’t turned over to face him yet, childishly wary of the intimacy of the act, at least until he gives her a sign.
“Briefly,” he says. “I was needed at the Sanctum.”
He was needed there—but he came back. “I thought you were the Master of New York.”
“I was,” he says, not bothering to correct her use of the unfamiliar jargon for once. “I’m sure I will be again soon. You don’t really want to talk about the Mystic Arts now, do you?”
Finally she rolls over, carefully, now almost afraid of jostling him. He’s so warm next to her, solid and strong. Stephen was always in shape, vain as he was—is—but his training changed him, hardened his body in ways she was only just beginning to get familiar with before 2018 happened. Now it’s unfamiliar territory again.
“What gave that away?” she murmurs.
He isn’t relaxed; he rarely ever is, or was. In all the times they’ve ever shared a bed, she’s caught him off guard only a handful of times, startling him from a deep sleep or waking to the feeling of him stroking her hair, clearly always under the impression he was being discreet. He’s watching her, his eyes colorless pools in the weird light, the almost fluorescent glow leaking from the half-open bathroom door.
He sighs softly when she kisses him, parting his lips almost immediately. He tastes good, like her spearmint toothpaste; she’s fine with sharing the body wash, but hopefully he manifested his own toothbrush. She can’t imagine what she smells or tastes like after the day she’s had, but he doesn’t seem to mind, draping an arm over her middle so that he can pull her closer. His fingers clench gently at the fabric of her camisole. She knows exactly why he picked these pajamas.
“Christine,” he says when she starts kissing his jaw, moving on autopilot, delirious with his nearness. “I don’t want you to feel—I didn’t come to you to—jump your bones or anything.”
“Don’t overthink this,” she says, and sets her teeth gently to his earlobe.
He shivers, a hand sliding down from the small of her back, dangerously low. “Did you miss me?” he asks.
It’s not a line. It isn’t like him to be needy, at least not so obviously. He’s always been temperamental, easily slighted and prone to passive aggression, but one of the reasons she’d broken up with him all those years ago was that she knew, ultimately, that he enjoyed her presence but would be totally fine without her. Maybe she’d wanted a cat after the blip to make up for his absence. Maybe he wouldn’t be totally fine without her anymore.
“Against my better judgment,” she says. Then, despite herself: “Of course I did.”
He groans softly, then rolls onto his back, pulling her on top of him. This is a change of pace from what she remembers. Back in the old days, the early days, sex with him was more of a challenge, a long-form exercise in flirtation, than anything. He liked to have the upper hand; he liked to make her come. She could live with the former as long as the latter was guaranteed.
He rests his big hands on her hips, pulling her into a slow, heady grind. “I knew you’d be okay,” he says. “That made it—a little easier.”
“Shh, it’s okay,” she says, not wanting to even think about it. She shifts to peel off her shorts and underwear, then leans down to kiss him again. This is almost like the other old days, the post-cult awakening, pre-blip old days, and if he keeps talking, their moment’s going to get snatched away again.
“Christine,” he says, mumbling against her mouth as she fumbles with the drawstring knot of his sweats. “Sweetheart, are you still on the—”
“IUD,” she says, although she couldn’t give a shit at this point, really. “Stephen, be quiet.”
Finally, he gives in; they’re both quiet as she settles down on him, save for the quick, shaky breathing neither of them can hide. He shifts under her, bending his knees for leverage, but lets her rock down on him selfishly, chasing pleasure, relief from the tension, from everything else she can’t handle right now.
“Stephen,” she says to the ceiling when it’s almost on top of her, her nails digging into his chest in a way that can’t be entirely pleasurable. “Stephen, I—”
“I know,” he says, his voice gravelly, coaxing. She feels near tears, caught in the rising tide in more ways than one. “Like that, just like that, c’mon.”
It’s her turn to slip off to the shower when they’re through. He’s sound asleep on his back when she comes out, his breath whistling softly, and he doesn’t stir as she puts on fresh PJs—underwear and a baggy old college t-shirt, now that she’s got her pick—and gets back into bed. She studies him for a while, still ignoring the clock as she counts his breaths, and falls asleep again entirely without meaning to.
Christine wakes with a crick in her neck, but almost doesn’t mind; the chest her head is resting on is warm and comfortable, and there’s a hand in her hair, lightly rubbing at her scalp. His movements aren’t as graceful as they once were, his fingers stiff as if arthritic, but the gesture is more endearing for it.
“Welcome to the land of the living,” Stephen says, his voice especially sonorous fresh from sleep.
“You’re the one that left it,” Christine says.
“Bad joke,” he agrees, still stroking her hair. “I’ll try again. Good morning.”
She shifts, getting more comfortable, lifting a hand to rest it on his abdomen. “Mm, is it morning?”
She feels him shift slightly as he looks around for the clock. “No,” he says, settling again. “It’s 12:37 PM.”
“Guess you’ll have to try one more time, see if you can get it right.”
He huffs softly, a gust of amusement tickling the top of her head. “When do you have to go in again?”
“I don’t know,” she admits, her insides giving a guilty squirm even as her body remains firmly planted on the mattress. She's not even sure where she left her phone. “I’m not exactly clear on what day it is. When do you have to go in?”
“Soon,” he says, and through her disappointment she’s gratified to hear the regret in his tone. “There’s—much to be done, now that it’s over.”
“Is it really over?” she asks, her voice low. His hand stills briefly, then goes back to its gentle stroking.
“Yes,” he says, a touch firmly. “The worst of it. The fallout has to be dealt with, that’s all.”
He makes it sound so simple, and from her perspective, perhaps it is; he leaves, for the Sanctum or for God knows where, and eventually he comes back, evil defeated. Only the last time he did that, he didn’t come back. Not for a long, long time, at least.
“Christine,” he says quietly. “Don’t go there. Wherever you are.”
She huffs, blinking back a fresh sheen of tears. She’s normally not this much of a crier—really. “You can read minds now?”
“No,” he says. Then, “Well . . .”
“Let me guess,” she says. “There’s a spell for that.”
She can practically feel his grin. There’s a beat of quiet, and then he asks, his voice a low rumble under her cheek, “What will make you feel better? About all of this?”
She lifts her head, finished with the dramatics, but also mostly because she needs to look at him. If he’s going to leave soon, she’d better get her fill now. “I’ll be alright,” she says, meaning it. “But, Stephen—you’ll find me, won’t you? When your business is finished.”
“Of course,” he says, his brows drawing together slightly. “I—”
“I don’t mean just for a night here and there,” she says, watching him. “I don’t want to go ‘all or nothing’ on you, but I—I don’t want to waste any more time.”
“Christine,” he says, his hand shifting from the nape of her neck, coming to cup her face. “You have all of me. You always will.”
Romantic declarations are unlike him, too, but she supposes she’s in dire need of one. He took an oath, after all.
Rather than speak immediately, she turns her head slightly to kiss his palm. He smiles. “Go, then,” she says. “Be a hero.”
He strokes a thumb over her cheekbone, the touch delicate, tender as it’s ever been. “You, too.”