Title: Metamorphosis
Author: jordannamorgan
Fandom: Doctor Strange (MCU)
Characters: Stephen, Christine, Wong.
Setting: Sometime after Doctor Strange.
Rating: PG.
Length: 2,809 words.
Summary: Christine could appreciate better than anyone what Stephen became, because she knew what he had been.
Notes: Submitted for the "Transformation" and "Choices" challenges here, as well as "Compare and Contrast" at genprompt_bingo.



“Christine!”

It was a summons that made Doctor Christine Palmer’s heart jump every time. She closed her eyes for just one moment—perhaps giving up something like a prayer—before she turned to see what manner of mayhem was approaching her in the hospital corridors now.

Stephen was closing in at a near-run, bearing a heavy burden in his arms. His cloak was thrown forward over his shoulder, mostly covering the slight figure he carried, but Christine caught a glimpse of Asian facial features and glazed, rolling eyes. A moan escaped the young man’s mouth.

At least this time it wasn’t Stephen himself.

In the past, the voice of the formidable Doctor Stephen Strange would cause everyone at the nurses’ station to leap to attention; yet now they barely glanced up. Just their crazy ex-colleague barging in with another drunk cosplayer, right? Apparently things got a little wild at the after parties of those sci-fi conventions he’d lost himself in since his accident.

…Seriously, if Stephen ever heard that cover story Christine had spread around, he was probably going to teleport her to Antarctica. Or maybe turn her into a gerbil or something.—Not that she was really sure he could do that with the freaking interdimensional mystic powers he’d come crashing back into her life with, but she really didn’t want to find out.

That possibility was far from her only reason for helping him when he came to her like this, but… well, it was on the list somewhere.

Without a word, she turned and shouldered her way into the small operating room she had learned to keep equipped for these occasions. Stephen followed, laying the young man on the table. At the same time, the Cloak of Levitation detached itself from him and retreated to a far corner, revealing what it had hidden from prying eyes: just below a very conventional makeshift tourniquet, a glowing golden haze that swirled with arcane symbols was spread across the patient’s right bicep. This magical seal or whatever it was blurred the view of the flesh beneath it, but Christine could make out the dark marring of damage and blood.

At a flick of Stephen’s fingers, the glow vanished, allowing Christine to properly appraise the wound. It was nasty—like some unholy combination of animal bite and third-degree burn.

She really wished that just once, Stephen would bring her an injury that looked like something she had actually seen before.

“What happened?” she demanded, even as the doctor-turned-sorcerer was raiding a cabinet for surgical gloves and elastic bandages.

“Basilisk bite. Extremely venomous.” Turning with the bandages to meet the full force of Christine’s stare, he shrugged helplessly at her. “Yeah, I know. That was a new one on me too.”

With no small effort, Christine swallowed down an incredulous huff. “Stephen, do I actually need to remind you that we don’t stock antivenin for mythological creatures here?”

“No.” He spared a second to glance up at her—almost apologetically—as he began winding a bandage tightly around the lethargic young man’s upper arm, just above the bite wound. “There’s a formula for a potion to counteract the venom, but no one’s used it for a few hundred years. Because, you know, basilisks are rare. Wong’s working on it. We just have to stabilize Eiji until he gets here. Same protocol as a snake bite.”

That explained what Stephen was doing with the bandages. Leaving the full tourniquet on while they waited would risk permanent damage, or even the loss of the patient’s arm. The elastic wrappings would provide a safer and more advisable compression for a while.

Eiji groaned on the table, his eyelids fluttering. Christine could see slackness in his facial muscles. She might not have known anything about envenomation by mythical beasts, but she had seen enough wackjobs come in with bites from dangerous illegal pets to know that was not a good sign.

Stephen paused to look into Eiji’s face. With a quivering, scar-seamed hand, he gently smoothed the young man’s hair, as if comforting a child… and the hand remained there as he raised his eyes to Christine.

In that gaze, she caught a glimpse of naked vulnerability that stole her breath.

“Saline drip,” he said quickly. “I can’t—”

He didn’t finish the sentence. There was no need, because Christine painfully understood: his hands were too unsteady to insert an intravenous needle.

Swallowing hard, she stepped forward to do it for him.

They worked together for the next few minutes, attaching leads to monitor Eiji’s vital signs, externally cleaning the wound. At one point Stephen used magic again. Although his gloved hands shook, they nonetheless moved with a grace that made his former surgical precision into something pale by comparison. The glow he conjured danced across his fingertips, racing up through the veins like lightning when he touched Eiji’s arm.

Christine didn’t know what the intended purpose of the spell was, and she was too full of wonder to ask. She only knew that it was absolutely beautiful.

When they had done all they could, there was no recourse but to wait for Wong to arrive with the antivenin potion. Christine went out briefly to fetch two cups of coffee; but on her return, she hesitated at the door, because through its window she could observe Stephen at Eiji’s side. Absent the latex gloves he had worn as they worked, he rested a hand on the young man’s shoulder and stared at nothing, his bearded face gaunt with shadows of guilt and pain.

After the glimpses she had seen of his newfound power, there were moments when Christine wondered if Stephen Strange was even human anymore—yet what she saw now was a humanity that she didn’t think had existed in him when he was an ordinary man.

In retrospect, she didn’t know how she had recognized him when he first reappeared, dressed like some kind of fairy-tale prince and in mortal danger of bleeding to death. The voice that called her name was familiar, but it came from a man irrevocably changed in body and soul. Almost completely a stranger… and in fact, literally Stranger. In all sorts of ways.

Whatever difficult journey Stephen took to gain his magic, it transformed him physically as well. Vanity had always compelled him to stay trim enough, but he much preferred to exercise his mind rather than his body, and that together with years of extravagant dining had made him… well, a bit soft. Yet on that day when he came back, when it was him on the operating table, the physique she felt underneath her hands was lean and taut and hardened by dedicated conditioning. When he clutched her shoulder to steady himself, even the crippled hands he so resented had a different kind of strength in them—one she couldn’t remember feeling before the accident that shattered them.

And all of that was nothing compared to the metamorphosis of his spirit.

If she sensed the difference in that first reunion, she hadn’t understood it, or had shrugged it off as mere shock after his injury. Her eyes were only opened later, following the death of the woman he called the Ancient One. Even when he was grieving the loss of his hands, of the career and life that once meant everything to him, Christine had never seen tears in Stephen’s eyes… but she had never seen such resolve in them, either.

…No. Not resolve, but surrender, of a kind that had nothing to do with defeat. What she witnessed was his acceptance of a destiny he had never chosen for himself—and it was in coming to terms with that destiny that he found his greatest strength of all.

Despite the goodness she knew was buried in his heart, Stephen the surgeon had once served others primarily to further his own status and acclaim. Now Stephen the sorcerer served others for their sake, at what risk to himself she couldn’t begin to imagine—and he did it entirely unseen by the world, veiled in the secrecy of the mystic arts. It was a humility she would never have dreamed he was capable of, and that more than anything made her heart ache with awe of the man he had become.

When such a force of nature humbled himself still further, resorting to the realm of mere mortals to ask for her help, she knew she could refuse him nothing.

Quietly, almost reluctantly, Christine slipped back into the room. As she approached Stephen, she held out his cup of coffee. It was sweetened with the exact amount of sugar she knew he liked—and not filled too full, lest the tremors in his hands should cause any to spill.

He raised his head, meeting her gaze with a look that was becoming too familiar: the one that almost seemed as if he didn’t see her for a second, blue eyes staring through her to some other, darker world. Then he blinked and gave her a murmured thanks. He reached out to wrap his hands tightly around the cup, the pressure against a solid object helping to steady them at least a little. Christine took the opportunity to study those hands, her eyes tracing the faded red lines of the scars that bisected his fingers.

She saw more than that, as well. On top of the callused scar tissue, she saw contusions and abrasions that were very fresh and raw.

“Stephen!” Quickly she set aside both her own cup and his, ignoring his noise of protest as he was deprived of the coffee before he could take a sip. She took his right hand in both of hers, turning it over to examine the recent damage that overlaid the old—and she immediately recognized what it came from.

“Geeze, have you been using these hands of yours to hit things now? …Please tell me you’re not going around punching mythical monsters.”

“No. I’m not that stupid.” Stephen’s eyes rolled away from her guiltily. “If you must know, I punched the guy who thought bringing a mythical monster into this dimension was a good idea. He was planning to sell its venom on the black market as an untraceable poison, and I had sort of a problem with that.”

Christine staunchly denied the abrupt flutter in her heart. Hitting people was bad; she knew that intellectually. Yet the note of righteous indignation in Stephen’s voice—the offense he took at someone deliberately creating a threat of harm to others, and the evidence of how fiercely, how protectively he reacted to that threat—couldn’t help but make her feel a little thrill.

She just wasn’t sure how much of it was fear for him, and how much was something else.

In the meantime, she could only stare dumbfounded at him. He turned his face away awkwardly, his gaze straying once more to the half-conscious Eiji; and then the shadows briefly dispelled by her presence all came back.

“This is my fault,” he muttered, with a small shake of his head.

The flutter turned into a swift, sympathetic squeeze. “Oh, Stephen. Whatever kind of fight you were in, I’m sure you did the best you—”

“That’s not what I mean.” His eyes were hard as they shifted back to hers, although that hardness was not for her. “I knew Eiji didn’t have the experience for a job that was actually dangerous, but I still let him talk me into bringing him along. He never should have been there in the first place… and that’s why what happened to him is because of me.”

Those words, and the look in Stephen’s eyes, made the breath evaporate from Christine’s lungs—and it was suddenly hard to draw a new one through the tightness in her throat.

In the old days Stephen might have made interns and nurses jump at his command, but that authority came only from reputation and force of personality. It wasn’t the sincere respect and leadership earned by having consideration for one’s subordinates—because if not for his uncannily retentive memory, he might not even have bothered to remember their names. Underlings were there to assist him when he needed them, and irrelevant to him when he didn’t. Few people among the entire hospital staff had accrued enough time and effort to become worthy of his attention.

Yet now, watching Stephen feel responsibility and compassion for his novice follower… Hearing his voice heavy with guilt for his decisions, for his failure to protect a young life under his command…

It wasn’t enough for Stephen to have become a mystical sorcerer. He had to go and become a damn soldier as well.

Moist heat flooded into Christine’s eyes. She glared up at Stephen through it, embarrassed at herself and half-angry at him for the fact that he could make her feel things like this.

“…You know, sometimes I miss the Stephen who never worried about anything more important than which insanely expensive watch he was going to wear to dinner.”

“No you don’t.”

The response was spoken with complete assurance: definitively a statement, rather than a question. Even so, his tone held a soft note of puzzled wonder—almost as if he was surprised to realize the truth of his own words.

Just that quickly, Christine’s anger dissolved, simmering down to a much gentler warm ache in her chest. Her shoulders slumped as she sniffled and blinked back the damp cloudiness from her gaze.

“Okay, so maybe not… but I do wish you’d think about taking care of yourself once in a while.”

Stephen stretched out a trembling hand. It grew a little more still as it came to rest on her cheek, and his thumb brushed away a tear that had escaped her.

“I spent my whole life taking care of myself, Christine.” He smiled wincingly. “You know what that got me.”

“And what has all this gotten you?” she demanded, more forcefully than she intended. Her hands swept apart in a gesture meant to encompass the everything of Stephen’s new life: the magic, the danger, the burdens of his decisions that could affect so much more than the life of a single patient. In the past she may have wanted him to show more care beyond himself, but to see him driven to this opposite extreme was just… so much.

He blinked in surprise at the outburst; but then his expression simply grew thoughtful. He looked away from her, his gaze falling to Eiji once more.

“The knowledge that no one else has to stand in my place.”

It was a simple and devastating answer. Christine pressed a hand over her mouth and swallowed hard, gulping down a fresh surge of tears as she understood his words.

What Stephen Strange could bear to do, to endure, to decide, he could spare anyone else from having to—and that was his solace.

Christine flinched as a dimensional gateway suddenly sparked open at the far side of the room. Stephen’s fellow sorcerer Wong emerged from it, casting only a brief dubious glance at the two doctors before he hurried to Eiji’s side with an ornate vial of shimmering blue liquid. She watched blankly as he tilted it with care into the young man’s mouth. A glow of the same cerulean shade coursed through Eiji’s veins, and his breathing immediately appeared to ease.

“He should recover now within a day.” Evidently satisfied that Eiji was stable, Wong turned and moved closer to the doctors, regarding Stephen with intent scrutiny. “Are you alright?”

Stephen blinked and straightened, his expression instantly becoming a mask.

“I’m fine.”

Judging by the dissatisfied frown on Wong’s face, he didn’t believe that lie any more than Christine did.

Without further comment, Stephen went into action, stepping over to disconnect the leads and remove the intravenous needle from Eiji’s body. Although he gave no command to the Cloak of Levitation—Christine could only wonder again if his communication with it was somehow telepathic—it floated to the bedside and stretched itself out flat, to bear Eiji’s weight like a stretcher when Stephen lifted and transferred him from the table.

“He just needs bed rest and fluids now. We can take care of him at Kamar-Taj.” The eyes Stephen raised to his former colleague were filled with things unsaid; but his only words were simple and small. “Thank you, Christine.”

“…Of course,” she all but whispered, to keep her voice from cracking.

Stephen nodded once, and without another word, he turned to join Wong in escorting the Cloak as it carried Eiji through the gateway. Only when it vanished behind them did Christine let out her trembling breath, wrapping her arms around herself to try to still the aching in her heart.

It was all just so unfair.

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2022 Jordanna Morgan