Strange & Pepper ficlet, for kijikun
For kijikun, with hugs to her kitty.
Title: Through Weal or Woe
Author: Elspethdixon
Fandom: 616!Marvel
Pairing: Technically canon pairings/gen. Think of it as Pepper/Strange pre-het (or Strange/Wong pre-slash. Or both)
Note: Technically songfic, I suppose, but minus the repetition of song lyrics because I possess shame these days and left them out. I do hang a lantern on my source for y'all, though.
Stephen Strange never lied, at least not to himself. A sorcerer could not afford self-delusion, especially not on other planes of reality, where existence itself was shaped by perception and will.
He did his best to maintain a calm demeanor and ignore his worries about what might be happening to Wong while he guided Tony Stark's secretary through the paths of unreality, but inside, Stephen had to admit that he was afraid.
"Do not speak to anyone unless they have spoken to you first," he told her. "And most certainly do not eat anything. Any action on your part that gives the illusions here greater reality in your mind will make this realm all the more difficult for you to leave."
"I wasn't planning on stopping for a snack," she said, with icy calm. "How long is it going to take to find Tony? And your friend?"
"That depends," Stephen said.
"On what?"
"On how strongly they desire us to find them."
"In that case," Ms. Potts muttered, "we'll be here for days."
***
Pepper had asked Strange which dimension this was, but his answer had made even less sense than such thing usually did. Wherever they were, it was lit all over by an eerie, sourceless light, and either side of the path was bracketed by towering cave walls, running with damp. If Pepper listened closely, she could hear water running somewhere behind them.
The ground under their feet was a morass of icy mud, just the kind of thing designed to suck shoes off your feet. She reminded herself with every step that not wasn't real, pictured herself setting her feet down on solid ground, imagining the satisfying click of her heels on tile floors, and it seemed to do the trick.
Neither of her three-inch stilettos sank so much as a millimeter into the mud.
When she got to wherever Tony was, she was going to demand a raise for this.
***
Their progress had been much too easy thus far. Strange almost felt relief when he and Ms. Potts rounded a perfectly domed hill -- the entire landscape here was a sea of hidden hollows and rolling hills that looked lower than they actually were, like the English moors -- and found themselves faced with a violently raging river.
"Remember," he said, for Ms. Pott's benefit, "what we see here has reality only if we choose to accept it."
The water swirled insubstantially around his knees, not real enough to so much as wet his cloak. When Ms. Potts climbed out, her clothing was likewise dry. Her alarmingly pointy heels, he noted, did not sink even a fraction into the mud of the river bank.
Such strength of will in one who was not trained in the mystic arts was unusual. Then again, Stephen had worked with Iron Man before. Ms Potts probably needed that strength of will to cope with her employer.
***
The water was easy. The mud was easy. Ignoring the old woman who had begged for their assistance -- just a drop of water, couldn't they go back to the stream and fetch her some -- was significantly more difficult, but Strange turned a deaf ear to her pleas like a man long accustomed to shrugging off people's requests for help, and Pepper thought of Tony and tried to imagine that the woman was a reporter clamoring for answers, or someone who desperately needed an appointment with Mr. Stark on zero notice.
Tony was all she had left, these days. She wasn't going to lose him by being too silly to follow the rules.
The river of blood, on the other hand, was more of a challenge.
It flowed sluggishly over the rocks with a disgusting gurgling sound, thicker than water and rank with the smell of rust and rotting meat. When she stepped into it, it came all the way up to her knees.
Strange, infuriatingly, was completely clean and dry when he reached the other side. Pepper stared down at her blood-drenched shoes and added another percentage point to the raise Tony owed her.
***
The path split in two several feet ahead of them, the divide sudden; it had not, Stephen suspected, been there until moments ago.
He surveyed the two roads ahead of him, one narrow, steep, and thickly overgrown with briars whose thorns held an ominous glint -- poisonous, without a doubt, if one let them be -- and the other broad, flat, and inviting.
"Someone must be joking," he muttered. "This is far too easy."
He took a step toward the thorn-covered road, and Ms. Potts grabbed him by the arm.
"Not that one," she said, and pointed with a slim, perfectly manicured hand.
There was a third road, a nearly invisible track in the grass that curved off around the side of the nearest hill, half-overgrown with moss and ferns.
"Thank you, Ms. Potts," he said. Reality was illusion here, and illusion reality, and one only flushed with embarrassment if one allowed oneself to.
***
It seemed as if they had been walking for hours, but Pepper's feet had not gotten sore or started to blister, and she wasn't the last bit hungry. A sign that time wasn't functioning normally here, or did people's astral forms simply not get tired, sore, or hungry?
She considered asking Strange, but she was beginning to suspect that he knew little more about this place than she did, and was making things up as he went along. He was very, very good at it, though. His air of confidence and control would have fooled just about any businessman she had ever worked with.
If he ever got tired of being a master of the mystic arts, Dr. Strange could make a fortune across a negotiating table.
Every path they took headed downwards, deeper into the caverns. This cavern seemed little different from the others -- great, evenly spaced stalactites & stalagmites formed pillars like those of a cathedral, or the Mines of Moria in the first Lord of the Rings movie, and the floor was, as usual, damp and muddy -- until she saw the great, flowing tree of stone in the cavern's center, and the woman under it.
She was heart-breakingly beautiful, her face almost too perfect to be human -- in fact, upon a second look, Pepper could see that the huge, blue eyes were just a fraction too large, the cheekbones too sharp and high, the chin too pointed.
Her hair was pure white, and stars glimmered within the folds of her robe.
"All hail thou mighty queen of heaven," Strange quoted, staring at her with an unreadable expression in his eyes, "for thy like on earth I ne'er did see." Then, louder, he called out, "Do you think to fool me with a false shape? I know who you truly are, my lady. By the powers of the Vishanti, I command thee to assume thy true form!"
Her laugh was like the ringing of bells. "You forget, little magician, your spells have no power here. What have you come for, you and your companion?"
"You know perfectly well why we're here," Pepper told her. "You've taken two men from our world. We'd like them back, please."
"The mortal knight is mine," the woman told her, her smile serene. "By what right do you lay claim to him? He is not your lover."
"No," she agreed. Tony could have been, once, but not now, not after everything that had happened between them. Happy's ghost would always hang there now, impossible to ignore. "But he is my friend."
"Then you should be happy for him." The woman waved a hand, and Tony appeared, stretched full length on the stone floor, his arms folded across his breast. He still wore his red and gold armor, but his helmet was off. His face was deathly pale, his eyes closed. "There is nothing left for him in your world. Nothing but pain and grief. I can give him peace."
"You can give him death, you mean," Strange said sharply.
"Have you never hungered for peace at any cost, magician? Never suffered pain so deep you would give up life itself to be rid of it?"
"Tony isn't giving up anything." Pepper's voice sounded shrill in her own ears, thin and afraid. "He has a business meeting tomorrow morning, and I'm not going to fill in for him again."
"He owes a debt to you, then?" the question was incurious, as if the answer were of minimal importance.
"He owes me my husband," Pepper hissed, and surprised herself with the pure venom in her voice, the heat of anger that rushed to her face. She wasn't entirely sure what had even prompted it; this woman had had nothng to do with Happy's death. "He does not get to die. Not after that. He doesn’t get to cost me both of them."
The woman blinked, looking mildly surprised. "A life owed is a great debt, indeed. The life of a lover, perhaps the greatest, save for that of a child." She paused. "I see from his mind that he owes you that, too. Very well, you may have him. But the other I will keep."
"You will not." Strange's voice was hard, angry. "Do not think that wearing that face will prevent me from unleashing the full force of my power against you."
Tony was stirring, his brows drawing together in a faint frown. Pepper pushed past the white-haired woman and went to help him sit up, listening to Strange and the woman with half an ear.
"I thought I told you that your power is meaningless here."
"Give him back, or I swear by Hoggoth, Agamotto, and Oshtur, I will raze this dimension to the ground." Strange sounded perfectly calm, but Pepper had heard that first flare of anger, and she was not fooled; she could hear the strain in his voice.
"Why should I, when your empty threats mean nothing to me?"
"Because he is mine!"
Tony was deathly pale, and seemed dazed -- she wasn't sure if he really knew what was happening, let alone how he'd gotten here. His armor, when she touched it, was so cold her damp fingers stuck to it.
"He is, is he?" the woman was asking. "And why is that?"
"Because I- because he wills it so!"
"Tony, come on, you have to pull yourself together. I can't carry you out of here, not in your armor."
He groaned. "Pepper? What are you doing here?"
Speech. And semi-coherent speech, at that. Pepper suppressed the urge to smile. "Can you help me take this armor off you? It's so cold I can barely touch it."
"Take off-- I'm not leaving my armor here!"
Another laugh from behind them. "You very nearly gave the wrong answer, magician. Tell me, there is no child or husband's life owed between you. Why should I give him back? What will you offer me for him?"
"What do you want?" Strange demanded.
"Your power, perhaps? Your life in exchange for his?" She smiled, and Tony stiffened, sitting upright with a jerk and pulling free from Pepper's grasp.
"That's Clea! The queen of the dark dimensions. What the hell?"
Pepper shook her head. "Whoever Clea is, I don't think that's her."
She could see Wong now, lying on the cave floor just beyond the woman, as pale and still as Tony had been.
"You cannot have what's mine," Strange said, desperation in his voice. "I allow you no power over me."
Labyrinth, Pepper thought. He's quoting Labyrinth. For a moment, she almost wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it. The fact that Strange probably didn't realize he sounded like the heroine in a Jim Hensen movie only made it funnier.
"Your hands," the woman -- the one who wasn't Clea -- asked, still so calm that it made Pepper's teeth hurt. "Will you give me one of your hands? Hold out your wrist, little magician, and you can have your servant back."
Strange went utterly still. Beside Pepper, Tony sucked in a sharp breath.
"If he actually lets her cut his hand off, he'll pass out from shock and blood loss and we'll never get out of here."
"I thought you wanted to stay," she snapped back. "I thought she was going to give you peace."
Tony shook his head. "I don't deserve peace." He struggled to one knee, frost flaking off the armor as he moved. "Don't listen to her Stephen," he called. "She's trying to trick you. She'll offer you everything you've ever wanted, but it's a lie."
Strange closed his eyes and held out his left hand.
Pepper's stomach lurched weightlessly, and time seemed to freeze as the woman stepped forward and wrapped one quartz-white hand around Strange's wrist.
"You have offered me your hand," she said, "and I have taken it. A true knight would have offered me his right hand, and then I would have bound him to stay by me for seven years." She smiled, her fingers digging into Strange's wrist. Tiny drops of blood ran between them, one of them falling to land on the cavern floor. "A true knight keeps his word without fear. You flinched when I touched you, and offered me your less valuable hand, besides. So take your servant and with him, a scar to remember me by."
She vanished in a swirl of light, and Wong sat up, one hand going to his forehead.
Strange fell to his knees on the cave floor, his right hand wrapped around his bloody left wrist and his shoulders visibly shaking.
***
His wrist burned with cold; he could feel the demon's touch clear down to the bones in his wrist. The leaf-litter of the forest floor was spattered with his blood.
She hadn't taken his hand. He had offered it, and she hadn't taken it.
There was a coughing sound. Stephen looked up, and saw Wong sitting up and rubbing at his face, no longer held in lifeless suspended animation.
He slipped twice on the leaf-mold getting across the clearing, until he reached the spot where Wong sat amidst the root of the massive tree that stood in the clearing's center. Wong said something -- he sounded surprised -- when Stephen dropped to his knees next to him and embraced him, but Stephen didn't catch it. Sound was buzzing in his ears, and the only thing that truly penetrated were that 1) he still had his hand and 2) Wong had been returned to him.
"Master," Wong was saying, the sound patchy, "Stephen. Let me see your wrist."
"I think we should leave now." That was Ms. Pott's voice, still perfectly collected and reasonable. "Before she comes back. We have a long way to walk."
"No we don't," Stephen corrected, striving for a commanding, knowledgeable tone worthy of the sorcerer supreme despite the fact that he currently had his face buried in Wong's shoulder. "We're in the center of her realm now, the point all power in this dimension radiates out from. We can simply open a gateway and step back across."
"How, exactly? Do we click our heels together three times and say, 'There's no place like home?'" Tony Stark sounded distinctly ungrateful to have been saved.
"Let me see your wrist, master."
"In a moment," Stephen said, forcing his relief back under control and pulling away from Wong. "First, I believe it is time for us to leave this place, as the lovely Ms. Potts suggested."
The light of the Eye of Agamotto picked out the sharp outline of a door in the center of the tree's massive trunk. Stephen set one hand against the bark and pushed -- his bloody fingerprints faded into the wood as if it were drinking them, which in this reality, it might very well have been -- and the door swung inward, revealing the grassy expanse of Central Park that he and Ms. Potts had departed from.
He made the other three step through first, just in case his departure from this realm was enough to close the gateway. Then he crossed through himself, pulling the door closed behind him.
It closed with an audible click, and he could feel reality itself flexing and rebounding back to its proper shape as the portal vanished.
"You quoted Thomas the Rhymer," Ms. Potts said, smiling at him just a little palely. "I guess you know Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, too?"
What in the name of Hoggoth's hoary hosts was she talking about? Stephen blinked at her, frowning. "What? Why do you ask?"
"You knew, didn't you? That it was the willingness to make the sacrifice that counted and not the sacrifice itself? Like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; the Knight doesn't actually want Gawain's head, he just wants Gawain to prove his honor and bravery by going through with his offer to let the Knight cut it off."
Stark answered for him, before he could summon up a proper response.
"I'm the one who used to read stories about knights in shining armor, and I didn't think of that."
Stephen shook his head, slowly. "Neither did I."
Ms. Potts' red-gold eyebrows rose. "You mean you didn't know that-- Damn it, why is every attractive man I meet a complete idiot with no sense of self-preservation?"
And then Wong, damn him, started laughing.
Title: Through Weal or Woe
Author: Elspethdixon
Fandom: 616!Marvel
Pairing: Technically canon pairings/gen. Think of it as Pepper/Strange pre-het (or Strange/Wong pre-slash. Or both)
Note: Technically songfic, I suppose, but minus the repetition of song lyrics because I possess shame these days and left them out. I do hang a lantern on my source for y'all, though.
Stephen Strange never lied, at least not to himself. A sorcerer could not afford self-delusion, especially not on other planes of reality, where existence itself was shaped by perception and will.
He did his best to maintain a calm demeanor and ignore his worries about what might be happening to Wong while he guided Tony Stark's secretary through the paths of unreality, but inside, Stephen had to admit that he was afraid.
"Do not speak to anyone unless they have spoken to you first," he told her. "And most certainly do not eat anything. Any action on your part that gives the illusions here greater reality in your mind will make this realm all the more difficult for you to leave."
"I wasn't planning on stopping for a snack," she said, with icy calm. "How long is it going to take to find Tony? And your friend?"
"That depends," Stephen said.
"On what?"
"On how strongly they desire us to find them."
"In that case," Ms. Potts muttered, "we'll be here for days."
***
Pepper had asked Strange which dimension this was, but his answer had made even less sense than such thing usually did. Wherever they were, it was lit all over by an eerie, sourceless light, and either side of the path was bracketed by towering cave walls, running with damp. If Pepper listened closely, she could hear water running somewhere behind them.
The ground under their feet was a morass of icy mud, just the kind of thing designed to suck shoes off your feet. She reminded herself with every step that not wasn't real, pictured herself setting her feet down on solid ground, imagining the satisfying click of her heels on tile floors, and it seemed to do the trick.
Neither of her three-inch stilettos sank so much as a millimeter into the mud.
When she got to wherever Tony was, she was going to demand a raise for this.
***
Their progress had been much too easy thus far. Strange almost felt relief when he and Ms. Potts rounded a perfectly domed hill -- the entire landscape here was a sea of hidden hollows and rolling hills that looked lower than they actually were, like the English moors -- and found themselves faced with a violently raging river.
"Remember," he said, for Ms. Pott's benefit, "what we see here has reality only if we choose to accept it."
The water swirled insubstantially around his knees, not real enough to so much as wet his cloak. When Ms. Potts climbed out, her clothing was likewise dry. Her alarmingly pointy heels, he noted, did not sink even a fraction into the mud of the river bank.
Such strength of will in one who was not trained in the mystic arts was unusual. Then again, Stephen had worked with Iron Man before. Ms Potts probably needed that strength of will to cope with her employer.
***
The water was easy. The mud was easy. Ignoring the old woman who had begged for their assistance -- just a drop of water, couldn't they go back to the stream and fetch her some -- was significantly more difficult, but Strange turned a deaf ear to her pleas like a man long accustomed to shrugging off people's requests for help, and Pepper thought of Tony and tried to imagine that the woman was a reporter clamoring for answers, or someone who desperately needed an appointment with Mr. Stark on zero notice.
Tony was all she had left, these days. She wasn't going to lose him by being too silly to follow the rules.
The river of blood, on the other hand, was more of a challenge.
It flowed sluggishly over the rocks with a disgusting gurgling sound, thicker than water and rank with the smell of rust and rotting meat. When she stepped into it, it came all the way up to her knees.
Strange, infuriatingly, was completely clean and dry when he reached the other side. Pepper stared down at her blood-drenched shoes and added another percentage point to the raise Tony owed her.
***
The path split in two several feet ahead of them, the divide sudden; it had not, Stephen suspected, been there until moments ago.
He surveyed the two roads ahead of him, one narrow, steep, and thickly overgrown with briars whose thorns held an ominous glint -- poisonous, without a doubt, if one let them be -- and the other broad, flat, and inviting.
"Someone must be joking," he muttered. "This is far too easy."
He took a step toward the thorn-covered road, and Ms. Potts grabbed him by the arm.
"Not that one," she said, and pointed with a slim, perfectly manicured hand.
There was a third road, a nearly invisible track in the grass that curved off around the side of the nearest hill, half-overgrown with moss and ferns.
"Thank you, Ms. Potts," he said. Reality was illusion here, and illusion reality, and one only flushed with embarrassment if one allowed oneself to.
***
It seemed as if they had been walking for hours, but Pepper's feet had not gotten sore or started to blister, and she wasn't the last bit hungry. A sign that time wasn't functioning normally here, or did people's astral forms simply not get tired, sore, or hungry?
She considered asking Strange, but she was beginning to suspect that he knew little more about this place than she did, and was making things up as he went along. He was very, very good at it, though. His air of confidence and control would have fooled just about any businessman she had ever worked with.
If he ever got tired of being a master of the mystic arts, Dr. Strange could make a fortune across a negotiating table.
Every path they took headed downwards, deeper into the caverns. This cavern seemed little different from the others -- great, evenly spaced stalactites & stalagmites formed pillars like those of a cathedral, or the Mines of Moria in the first Lord of the Rings movie, and the floor was, as usual, damp and muddy -- until she saw the great, flowing tree of stone in the cavern's center, and the woman under it.
She was heart-breakingly beautiful, her face almost too perfect to be human -- in fact, upon a second look, Pepper could see that the huge, blue eyes were just a fraction too large, the cheekbones too sharp and high, the chin too pointed.
Her hair was pure white, and stars glimmered within the folds of her robe.
"All hail thou mighty queen of heaven," Strange quoted, staring at her with an unreadable expression in his eyes, "for thy like on earth I ne'er did see." Then, louder, he called out, "Do you think to fool me with a false shape? I know who you truly are, my lady. By the powers of the Vishanti, I command thee to assume thy true form!"
Her laugh was like the ringing of bells. "You forget, little magician, your spells have no power here. What have you come for, you and your companion?"
"You know perfectly well why we're here," Pepper told her. "You've taken two men from our world. We'd like them back, please."
"The mortal knight is mine," the woman told her, her smile serene. "By what right do you lay claim to him? He is not your lover."
"No," she agreed. Tony could have been, once, but not now, not after everything that had happened between them. Happy's ghost would always hang there now, impossible to ignore. "But he is my friend."
"Then you should be happy for him." The woman waved a hand, and Tony appeared, stretched full length on the stone floor, his arms folded across his breast. He still wore his red and gold armor, but his helmet was off. His face was deathly pale, his eyes closed. "There is nothing left for him in your world. Nothing but pain and grief. I can give him peace."
"You can give him death, you mean," Strange said sharply.
"Have you never hungered for peace at any cost, magician? Never suffered pain so deep you would give up life itself to be rid of it?"
"Tony isn't giving up anything." Pepper's voice sounded shrill in her own ears, thin and afraid. "He has a business meeting tomorrow morning, and I'm not going to fill in for him again."
"He owes a debt to you, then?" the question was incurious, as if the answer were of minimal importance.
"He owes me my husband," Pepper hissed, and surprised herself with the pure venom in her voice, the heat of anger that rushed to her face. She wasn't entirely sure what had even prompted it; this woman had had nothng to do with Happy's death. "He does not get to die. Not after that. He doesn’t get to cost me both of them."
The woman blinked, looking mildly surprised. "A life owed is a great debt, indeed. The life of a lover, perhaps the greatest, save for that of a child." She paused. "I see from his mind that he owes you that, too. Very well, you may have him. But the other I will keep."
"You will not." Strange's voice was hard, angry. "Do not think that wearing that face will prevent me from unleashing the full force of my power against you."
Tony was stirring, his brows drawing together in a faint frown. Pepper pushed past the white-haired woman and went to help him sit up, listening to Strange and the woman with half an ear.
"I thought I told you that your power is meaningless here."
"Give him back, or I swear by Hoggoth, Agamotto, and Oshtur, I will raze this dimension to the ground." Strange sounded perfectly calm, but Pepper had heard that first flare of anger, and she was not fooled; she could hear the strain in his voice.
"Why should I, when your empty threats mean nothing to me?"
"Because he is mine!"
Tony was deathly pale, and seemed dazed -- she wasn't sure if he really knew what was happening, let alone how he'd gotten here. His armor, when she touched it, was so cold her damp fingers stuck to it.
"He is, is he?" the woman was asking. "And why is that?"
"Because I- because he wills it so!"
"Tony, come on, you have to pull yourself together. I can't carry you out of here, not in your armor."
He groaned. "Pepper? What are you doing here?"
Speech. And semi-coherent speech, at that. Pepper suppressed the urge to smile. "Can you help me take this armor off you? It's so cold I can barely touch it."
"Take off-- I'm not leaving my armor here!"
Another laugh from behind them. "You very nearly gave the wrong answer, magician. Tell me, there is no child or husband's life owed between you. Why should I give him back? What will you offer me for him?"
"What do you want?" Strange demanded.
"Your power, perhaps? Your life in exchange for his?" She smiled, and Tony stiffened, sitting upright with a jerk and pulling free from Pepper's grasp.
"That's Clea! The queen of the dark dimensions. What the hell?"
Pepper shook her head. "Whoever Clea is, I don't think that's her."
She could see Wong now, lying on the cave floor just beyond the woman, as pale and still as Tony had been.
"You cannot have what's mine," Strange said, desperation in his voice. "I allow you no power over me."
Labyrinth, Pepper thought. He's quoting Labyrinth. For a moment, she almost wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it. The fact that Strange probably didn't realize he sounded like the heroine in a Jim Hensen movie only made it funnier.
"Your hands," the woman -- the one who wasn't Clea -- asked, still so calm that it made Pepper's teeth hurt. "Will you give me one of your hands? Hold out your wrist, little magician, and you can have your servant back."
Strange went utterly still. Beside Pepper, Tony sucked in a sharp breath.
"If he actually lets her cut his hand off, he'll pass out from shock and blood loss and we'll never get out of here."
"I thought you wanted to stay," she snapped back. "I thought she was going to give you peace."
Tony shook his head. "I don't deserve peace." He struggled to one knee, frost flaking off the armor as he moved. "Don't listen to her Stephen," he called. "She's trying to trick you. She'll offer you everything you've ever wanted, but it's a lie."
Strange closed his eyes and held out his left hand.
Pepper's stomach lurched weightlessly, and time seemed to freeze as the woman stepped forward and wrapped one quartz-white hand around Strange's wrist.
"You have offered me your hand," she said, "and I have taken it. A true knight would have offered me his right hand, and then I would have bound him to stay by me for seven years." She smiled, her fingers digging into Strange's wrist. Tiny drops of blood ran between them, one of them falling to land on the cavern floor. "A true knight keeps his word without fear. You flinched when I touched you, and offered me your less valuable hand, besides. So take your servant and with him, a scar to remember me by."
She vanished in a swirl of light, and Wong sat up, one hand going to his forehead.
Strange fell to his knees on the cave floor, his right hand wrapped around his bloody left wrist and his shoulders visibly shaking.
***
His wrist burned with cold; he could feel the demon's touch clear down to the bones in his wrist. The leaf-litter of the forest floor was spattered with his blood.
She hadn't taken his hand. He had offered it, and she hadn't taken it.
There was a coughing sound. Stephen looked up, and saw Wong sitting up and rubbing at his face, no longer held in lifeless suspended animation.
He slipped twice on the leaf-mold getting across the clearing, until he reached the spot where Wong sat amidst the root of the massive tree that stood in the clearing's center. Wong said something -- he sounded surprised -- when Stephen dropped to his knees next to him and embraced him, but Stephen didn't catch it. Sound was buzzing in his ears, and the only thing that truly penetrated were that 1) he still had his hand and 2) Wong had been returned to him.
"Master," Wong was saying, the sound patchy, "Stephen. Let me see your wrist."
"I think we should leave now." That was Ms. Pott's voice, still perfectly collected and reasonable. "Before she comes back. We have a long way to walk."
"No we don't," Stephen corrected, striving for a commanding, knowledgeable tone worthy of the sorcerer supreme despite the fact that he currently had his face buried in Wong's shoulder. "We're in the center of her realm now, the point all power in this dimension radiates out from. We can simply open a gateway and step back across."
"How, exactly? Do we click our heels together three times and say, 'There's no place like home?'" Tony Stark sounded distinctly ungrateful to have been saved.
"Let me see your wrist, master."
"In a moment," Stephen said, forcing his relief back under control and pulling away from Wong. "First, I believe it is time for us to leave this place, as the lovely Ms. Potts suggested."
The light of the Eye of Agamotto picked out the sharp outline of a door in the center of the tree's massive trunk. Stephen set one hand against the bark and pushed -- his bloody fingerprints faded into the wood as if it were drinking them, which in this reality, it might very well have been -- and the door swung inward, revealing the grassy expanse of Central Park that he and Ms. Potts had departed from.
He made the other three step through first, just in case his departure from this realm was enough to close the gateway. Then he crossed through himself, pulling the door closed behind him.
It closed with an audible click, and he could feel reality itself flexing and rebounding back to its proper shape as the portal vanished.
"You quoted Thomas the Rhymer," Ms. Potts said, smiling at him just a little palely. "I guess you know Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, too?"
What in the name of Hoggoth's hoary hosts was she talking about? Stephen blinked at her, frowning. "What? Why do you ask?"
"You knew, didn't you? That it was the willingness to make the sacrifice that counted and not the sacrifice itself? Like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; the Knight doesn't actually want Gawain's head, he just wants Gawain to prove his honor and bravery by going through with his offer to let the Knight cut it off."
Stark answered for him, before he could summon up a proper response.
"I'm the one who used to read stories about knights in shining armor, and I didn't think of that."
Stephen shook his head, slowly. "Neither did I."
Ms. Potts' red-gold eyebrows rose. "You mean you didn't know that-- Damn it, why is every attractive man I meet a complete idiot with no sense of self-preservation?"
And then Wong, damn him, started laughing.