and the stars look very different today | stark/strange psl

[industries]

prologue

On March 4th, 2024, a user named Astronautala04 makes a post on Instagram.

"this is CRAZY shit," the caption reads. "spent 3 months taking NASA's raw data on the distribution of galaxy superclusters thru the known universe. applied a grid, assigned x and y values to an audio scale for shits and giggles. listen."

Anyone clicking on the corresponding video sees a white bar slowly cross over a 3D image, overlaid with clouds of green-and-pink pixels. It starts to play noise -- warbled, distorted. At first blush, there's nothing there.

But then the bar crosses over more points in the cloud. Synthesized guitar hits start to play, and it soon becomes clear -- it's AC/DC's "Back in Black."

The video only gets a few thousand views its first week, until the lead singer for the indy band Jill & the Starstrucks retweets it. Then it racks up hits -- hundreds of thousands, then millions, as it migrates from Twitter to BuzzFeed to the mainstream news. It's the first thing in months to rank above hashtags #my5years and #iwasdust.

"Tell us, Cindy," a daytime CNN host talk-laughs, as he turns exactly ninety degrees away from the camera. "This has whipped up quite a frenzy, but -- can it be possible?"

Cindy Justison, paid astronomy expert, shakes her head. "There's no 'up' or 'down' in the universe, Tom. And what's represented in this model is just the sliver we can see, here from Earth. This guy probably messed with settings and perspectives before he got something that happened to be suggestive of a song. Hate to be a--"

"Kind of a downer!"

She laughs. "I'm just giving you the science. Sorry, Tom."

Astronautla04 gains a few thousand followers. There are a couple human interest stories of how he's a college kid, and now has an invitation to work at the big telescopes in Maui. Interest dies down.

A couple months later, a user named PetersonFam423 comments to the original post.

"My daughter showed me this. So cool!!!" it reads. "God is real, and he loves AC/DC."

Comments

[rehandle]

It's been a month. Feels more like a year. Time, it turns out, never needed to be manipulated along the plane of infinity to change its shape. Time's shape changes of its own volition, in its own ways, whenever the feeling strikes. And now that he no longer has the power to reclaim it, to shift it back and let the clocks try again, he too has to relearn how to live under its weight.

Fifteen days ago, it was over five years ago. Now, five years and some time later, he's two weeks and over fourteen million condensed sets of varying periods of time older, and the renewed planet is learning very quickly how to be old again.

All things have their price. His choice is no different. Some hours go like minutes, some days go like weeks. This is what time is at the crux of it. Every action and the ways in which it moves you passed through a complicated equation to provide the stretch you have to bear to be over with it. Or the quick glance you get before it's behind you, no matter how you'd wish you could just hold on.

The last couple of weeks have been full of time that wouldn't let him go. Jobs to do that kept him entrenched in them, the act easy but the doing of it hard. A battlefield strewn with bodies whose fate he sealed in opening the way for one very particular outcome, all of them needing to be transported back to their homes. An uncertain stream of thanks from people who now understand that his one small option opened a window that gave them a chance... all of whom had lost somebody vital. Not all of whom could quite look him in the eye.

An effort to restructure the Masters, to regain a sense of what dangers were left unfaced in the lost time. Integration into domestic issues: the world on a new trajectory, unbalanced, needing all the help it can get.

A wake.

Sleeping. Hardest, that. The first time he'd allowed himself to close his eyes he'd been out for sixteen hours, but every attempt thereafter has been a waste of time.

He's been running on empty for going on three days now, running just fine. But even now, not everyone averts their eyes from him. Reverence or resentment or an unwillingness to question what it is they'll feel if they look. For better or for worse, Wong not only looks but sees. And even Stephen Strange can't deny him forever when he's told it's time to take a day off. Get back out in the world. Go and appreciate what it is that's been saved.

In a way, it's a relief to have the onus of his own life removed from him. If only for a day.

So he steps out onto the sidewalk, into the sun. Clothes just clothes for once, hands just hands, aching with overuse but unburdened. Birds sing. Traffic, just now learning what it is to be jammed again, howls somewhere further off into the city. Stephen's attention follows a stranger as they bustle past him on the sidewalk. He takes note of the hunch of their shoulders, the newness of their shirt. He wonders how long they've been alive. Then he turns his focus forward, back out to the street—

Stops.

There's something. Just on the other side of here, just beyond now. Something big, something that shouldn't have gone undetected. Something he should've seen coming.

But he didn't. And neither did anyone else, no alarms raised, no frantic calls to action, no idle remarks that a being had been sighted and dealt with. Nothing is any different than it was amongst the ranks of the mystically inclined. Busy as they are, bruised and rebuilding as they are, entities don't appear outside the New York Sanctum without any of them any the wiser. They don't slip under the radar like that.

Not unless they're beyond anything they've thought to guard against. Or unless it's been there since before the radar.

A few quiet moments pass, Stephen on the brink of decision. Should he call on the others?

Curiosity is a killer. But still, he raises his hands, spreads them, and steps through the mirror into a dimension beyond. Greenwich Village around them is a collection of blurred fractals like strangely frosted glass. And whatever it is that waits ahead is now clearer, present in a way "reality" doesn't like to acknowledge things that people can't conceive of.

"My name is Doctor Stephen Strange. I stand here in defense of this dimension and this planet. What is it you want?"

[industries]

It's been a while since he's spoken to anyone. Since the girl. He can't remember her name, or the names of others who have stopped to talk -- one most of all, a calm one, an Ancient One, though not as old as him. She smiled at him, sometimes, when leaving the building he had watched built, brick-by-brick, from foundations to roof, wards and symbols scrawled in its bones. "Don't worry," she told him, though he never answered, "he'll be here soon enough."

And he is.

He only needs to lean forward slightly, a fraction of a degree, before the man's head snaps toward him. He knows what happens next, but watches it play out regardless -- the man's small, violent tear between realities before he marches in like he owns the place. As if he could own anything, when he's so small.

Small, with big words. They're odd ones to hear, after so long. Maybe he'd laugh, if he could.

Instead he watches him, this man he remembers in bits and pieces, whose intersection with his had been small in length, but unending in volume -- then, and eons from now. A few seconds of contemplation go by before it occurs to him that time is different for people than it is for him. He can't waste the days he has with them. That's why he's here.

He feels himself contract and expand, like a breath. White orbs grow along his insides as wisps of darkness pull away from the gyroscope patterns of the world around him. It's only then that it becomes apparent how far he stretches out -- into the outlines of buildings, the roots of trees, the paths traversed by feet on the sidewalk. Near them, far from them, around streetcorners, up skyscrapers. To the clouds.

"I know who you are," he says. "I've been waiting for you. I want..."

He pauses. He's been waiting so long, so many times, that it's become hard to remember why. He reaches outward, past the city and far beyond -- tries to find his reasons and feels them in the white-hot edges of supernovae and noxious gas of barren worlds. Shards of hurt. Loss.

He reaches inward, then, to the core of him, the speck upon which infinite layers are built. He opens it up like something precious and gazes inside, sees callused fingers wrap a bandage around a small hand, smells flowers in a woman's wet hair.

The white orbs rise like eyes. His thoughts falter.

"I want... to go home."

[rehandle]

The things moves. Moves not here describing a travelling or a change of position— it moves, tendrils of it rippling and shifting both in front of his eyes and elsewhere in spite of them, and is revealed. Revealed to be everywhere. Before him, beside him, layering the earth and disappearing up into the sky, existing beyond what his peripheral vision can take in. He can't help the assessing glance cast to one side then the other, up, a brief sinking of something that might be dread or might be awe (or might be both) dropping heavy in his viscera.

He breathes into it. Takes it in, lets it settle in him. A myriad of incantations run across his mind even as he quiets himself, even as he watches those orbs form and waits for an answer. Waits to know which way this will go.

Each new element brings its own question. I know who you are. I've been waiting for you.

I want to go home.

He's not been in this game long compared to some but he knows he has a role to play that's bigger than him, stretches beyond what he knows of his own future, what he's reached of his own potential. I know who you are. Yes. Probable. Past or future, pocket, somewhere. Something about the dark, about the shadow that lifts then blends back into the city as far as the eye can see.

I've been waiting for you. Less clear, but playing to a theory. And why not, if we accept the initial premise? But then...

I want... I want...

A small crease in Stephen's brow.

All that's come before aligns. It fits the mold, though he couldn't say for sure what that mold looks like yet. The mold of something vast from somewhere else, obscure enough to be recognisable for that obscurity.

But hesitation?

His answer comes steady and without any sign of the calculations running themselves over in his thoughts as he speaks, the spells pre-selected to buy time if he needs it, the likelihood of their being necessary, the possibility that all is not what it seems. Sweat prickles over the hairs at the back of his neck where they're stood, body abuzz with physiological cues to flee, or to crumple, or to laugh. David stands before Goliath's bigger, less corporeal brother, his slingshot empty, and does not give an inch.

This is his purpose. Moments like these. To be the one who stands here before something incomprehensible and speak before he strikes. If he can't hold his nerve, there's nobody here to hold it for him.

"And you want my help?"

Ordinarily he would proceed direct to a checklist of questions, more than happy to move anything off-dimension that ought not be there. Where are you from, why are you here, are there any threats we should be aware of before moving you on?

But there's something in the language. Broken thought, interrupted journeys, all common to the games of neurons. Feeling. Home.

Either he's being manipulated, played both for his arrogance and his sentiment, his humanity, or...

Or what? He doesn't know. And he needs to. And for that, they need to talk.

[industries]

The man thinks he's in danger, worries his world is under threat. He prepares for that eventuality, mentally calculates the risks, surveys the scope of his potential enemy's existence for a recourse, and finds there is none.

It's... a strange thing to watch. Less like an ant preparing to battle a god and more like a cell contemplating war on its own body -- the very fabric of which it's part.

Strange. That's the man's name. He hasn't used names in some time, generally finds no use for them. They're subjective, determined by transient lives. Completely arbitrary to a being who knows what a thing is, what it's been, what it will become.

And there's so much ahead of this one.

He knows Strange is a man who believes actions before words, so rather than translate his intentions to language, he changes shape. He allows himself to fade back into what he is -- clouds, light, air. The inhale to his previous exhale, pulling himself back into the atoms with which he resonates across time. He can mostly control himself on this plane, or at least how he appears to the few who can perceive him. How he manifests in the physical world is another matter entirely, and that's part of why he can't...

Why he can't touch them. Hold them. Not in a way they'd understand.

He throbs again, with hurt. An old sun collapses. Maybe Strange can feel it, though more likely what he sees is his reformed presence, contracted and concentrated to a section of the block rather than the entire island, city, world. It would be more reassuring, he knows, if he could make himself smaller, and person-shaped, but he's forgotten how.

He stays there a few moments, like one would crouch in front of a distrusting dog. (A memory: He sits next to his mother on an airfield as they wait for a plane to land. He sees a stray with matted hair and sad eyes, approaches it, offers half a sandwich from his open hand. He smells wet, unwashed dog as he scratches it behind the ears, with the blunt tips of his nails--)

Time is different for people than it is for him. He must act. He must make this man understand that he's the one who needs to help him, the only one who can. It doesn't matter that he already knows it will happen, because Strange doesn't yet.

"Yes." He tips his glowing wisps in the suggestion of a nod. "We've... met before. A long time ago."

Twice, to be more accurate -- once, eons ago, and again, not so long before now. Funny, he thinks -- to Strange these measures of time might seem reversed.

"You're the one who will get me to where I belong. To what I am."

What I am. Because he knows it deep down, in the depths of him, the same way he knows the trajectory of galaxies, the hum of empty space, his birth from an accidental instant to the beginning of time.

The speck, under the infinite layers. Without it, he's everything. He's nothing.

slams back in over a month later

[rehandle]

The thing before him (and behind him and beneath him and everywhere) takes its time in formulating its response. Then the change comes. The change pulls it away from sight, and Stephen knows without his eyes and his brain necessarily managing to compute it as it happens that it's returning to the truth of itself. Knowing that dimensions have been made of beings is one thing. Comprehending that the fabric of this reality is as alive as any other has potential to be is quite another.

But you cannot exist as a sorcerer for as long as he has and be surprised when the multiverse finds means to shock you. The shock of it in itself makes it normal. This is how he lives. He doesn't so much as flinch.

Another shift, a tug Stephen feels, somehow, as much as sees, and it's back in concentrated form. Visible. Self-restricted.

Everything human in him wants to give in to fear, the fearful impulse to attack that which is unknown, to assume danger and to lash out at it (once upon a time he might have been the kind to flee - not anymore). But he no longer has the liberty to succumb to base impulse. There is always too much riding on the choices he makes. Instead of allowing the frantic rush of adrenaline to swell into action, Stephen assesses the facts. This thing is everywhere. It's bigger than him, bigger than this city, bigger than this Earth. It could swallow them in an instant. Smother them, snuff them out.

Instead, it makes itself small and it speaks.

There is no need for trickery when you hold the reins of existence.

It allows him his pauses, too. After one of them, a swallow to wet his drying mouth, he asks the inevitable.

"And what is that?"

And why does it feel like he's reaching for something equal parts impossible and impossibly close. We've met before. A long time ago.

like infinitony, i woULD WAIT FOREVER

[industries]

He's not surprised Strange is still afraid, even as he steadies his words and stance. He remembers, in moments, the fleeting emotions of finite beings, though some of them are now too distant to imagine. The idea of feeling threatened, of facing nonexistence -- it's an impossibility to him, nothing but an old memory.

And yet fear is still familiar to him, when so many other things have faded. Fear is what keeps him rooted to this spot, what keeps him speaking to this man despite the distrust, despite the fact that he could be so many other places, times, forms -- could be everywhere, and everything, rather than focused into the the tip of a needle, an infinitesimal moment in a space so small that he hums and vibrates within it.

Fear is still familiar to him, because while he no longer faces nonexistence, there are others who do. Others who mean more than the space between one galaxy and the next, than the dense center of a black hole. Whose faces and lives he has carved into himself for fear of losing them, for fear they may fall from his grasp and be lost among other grains of sand.

Fear that he may lose more than he already has. That he may forget them, and fear nothing at all.

What I am.

"I..."

On the city street, wisps of his presence draw inward.

"I don't know. I need to... remember. So I can go home."

He feels the futility in his words even as they leave him. He knows the end of this path, the chasm he walks. He will never get back what he lost. He will never go home.

But still a voice cries out in him, clutches at sunlight and tries to catch it. He needs to try. Even if it ends in failure and despair, he has to try. He owes them that much -- the grains of sand made of warmth and love. He watches them like he has for years, curled together on a bed, one holding the other, faces lit by photos on a screen. He has to try.

And maybe that's it -- the trying, in the face of inevitability. Maybe that's the part of him still...

"Human."

A hundred eye-like stars rise to meet Strange's gaze, shining from a thousand writhing tendrils of shadow.

"I was human."

GREAT PERFECT thank u infiniterin I hope you will never have to again

[rehandle]

So I can go home.

Stephen stands by, the word home no longer new in this context if no less worthy of note. This great and incalculable danger searches for its truth and his own expression remains impervious in his waiting.

Human.

Impervious until it isn't.

A crack, a muscular tic of the brow. What?

I was human.

The being looks at him with a hundred specs of light and Stephen loses focus.

His mind flies, chasing that impossible word down to its core and out into what he's seeing. Human. How? Human? We've met before. A long time ago. His vision has no strength here but his gaze flits all the same, tries to make sense, hunt for a shape that means anything or a spell that might turn something so terminable into something seemingly infinite and just keeps shuddering into nothing, nothing, finding noth—

The sharp stutter of an inhale marks the moment.

No spell. No spell, of course no spell, but -

Oh, God.

Nothing.

Oh, God.

Is this better, or worse?

He knows the answer to that.

"No."

This shouldn't be possible. But the stones shouldn't be possible. Mass genocide shouldn't be possible. Life shouldn't be possible. So many billions of inexplicable things composing a multiverse that exists all the same. This is not a question of possibility. It doesn't matter whether or not this should be possible. This should not be.

Thoughts rove on. The fear he felt moments ago is drowned by the maelstrom starting up in him. He keeps it in his chest, keeps it in his eyes. Keeps it out of his mouth too expertly, voice bereft of any color.

"I can't undo this."

If that's what's asked of him, it can't be done. This is too complete. This is too far beyond.

His fear now isn't for the retribution of a righteous god. His fear is that he may have represented hope, and he must kill that too.

steEPLES FINGERS

[industries]

Strange knows.

It was only a matter of time. He was going to find out, in this moment, in this chain of events, as expected and unsurprising as the pull of gravity in an orbit, or the phases of a moon. He's already seen it more times than he can remember, and yet...

Being here, focused in the single moment, on the man's wide eyes and clenched jaw, it's... odd. Gripping. It sends a white-hot filament to somewhere deep inside him, connects one piece to another with electric thread.

He feels a ghost of a sensation from long ago, from a body so much smaller than this one. His heart skips a beat.

This is a first time, he realizes. "Firsts" don't often come for him, not since time immemorial, so this moment -- here, braced on the needlepoint of a pin, with him more present and condensed in a single moment than he has since he was born, it feels... significant. Different.

Someone recognizes him for the man he used to be.

He takes it in for a second. Breathes it.

And yet he can't linger long, because there are things being said that don't make sense -- that betray this man's ignorance and arrogance even in this, a moment of reckoning, of naked humility.

He pulls his tendrils back slowly, along the edges of buildings. His energy and atoms ebb and flow into the world around him.

"Why would I want to undo what is?"

It sounds even more absurd, laid bare with words. Why would he cut off the hands that built spirals from plasma, heat from gas, that took a cloud of dusty matter and pulled it together because it had to be? That waited while the matter coalesced to make dirt and seas, while volcanoes blew out hot floes of land, while cells formed, and fish swam, and floated to shore and walked on legs?

That was the first time, when he became impatient, when he went to find the man in front of him and instead found the planet slowing to entropy. And here he is -- just a handful of sun cycles from the conception of it all, when a transient life raised a shaking hand and wished for the power to protect his home.

Home. The word thrums through him again, sharper this time, along the same electric thread. He returns his attention to Strange.

"There's a place, not far from here."


'Not far' is an understatement. He reaches through earth made of dirt and rust and comes up through moss, and trees, and air.

"It's warm," he says. "There's a fire and the air smells like rain. I need..."

Need? There is no need here. He tries another word.

"Want. I want to remember how to hold them."

[rehandle]

The announcement moves through him in another uncomfortable cresting of forceful tides, churning back on themselves as Stephen's assumptions are made a ramp of. Wrong, but offering exactly the trajectory needed to carry the truth bludgeoning back toward his guilt.

His family. He's speaking about his family.

(His. It's too soon to make this unfathomable expanse a man. It can't be that easy. Origins do not dictate a thing's truth and this thing cannot just be Tony Stark the second he extracts himself from the enormity of everything just to ask for help to hold his wife and child.

... )

His family.

The family Stephen last saw from a distance as he excused himself from their home on the day they sent proof of Tony's heart to float off for other shores. His home. The home he wants to return to.

It's too big to think about. If he keeps thinking this way, thinking of the death of half of all things and the price that was paid, of the worth of life and the cost of its ending, thinking of a sea of people come to mourn and a little girl whose remaining years will be spent owed to and missing a man she'll only have known for a fraction of the days she'll live— something is going to happen.

Carefully, Stephen Strange boxes himself in.

This thing beyond comprehension wishes to understand how to be contained. It's not just that he wants to see them: he wants to be there. With them. Wants to feel him home, smell it, wants go there. Physically. And if he's going to be with them, he's going to need to be recognizable. He'll need to be himself, need to seem himself. More importantly than the body, he'll need to be safe. Fortified without against what's contained within.

Looking on at the swelling, receding, stretching, shrinking mist of celestial matter before him, it's obvious what he needs to say. What actually sits within the realms of possibility.

But the box he keeps himself in has suffered too many blows. Secure as it is, he still seeps out through cracks, peers from knots in wood, whispers through the keyhole.

"I'd ask how much time you have but something tells me that's not a concern."

Time.

They're going to need it.

bet you thought you saw the last of me

[industries]

He waits for Strange's mind to process what it needs to. He knows what that might be, by knowing the causes and effects that led here. And yet, when he tries to trace the thread through Strange's mind, it becomes... difficult to follow. The twists and turns, logic butting up against the irrational only to be overtaken. This is a man with a great degree of control, but he is still a man.

He was once a man. He can remember thoughts, running up and down pathways made deep by repetition, spiked by emotion. But it's unintuitive, distant. Like trying a tetrahedal peg in a round hole.

Or maybe it's the nebulae he swirls into stars over the thousand Earth aeons it takes for Strange's synapses to fire. Or the single-celled progenitors on another dimensional plane, or the light in a little girl's eyes as she builds robots from blocks.

The girl grows older. Greyer. She dies and decomposes. A tree grows where--

He snaps back to this point of existence. The violence of it startles him.

"It is, for you," he says. "For them."

Time. He knows Strange might take it for granted, as a man who once had the means to use it. But to manipulate a thing is to admit having no control over it, itself, its natural order.

Him being here is not the natural order.

The tendrils of his existence contract further.

"The Ancient One opened your mind to me, once -- part of me. What you could perceive." Some of his eye-like spheres blink away, back into blackness.

"I need the opposite. I need... someone to show me what that might be."

He lets it sink in. The nebula's stars grow yellow, orange, red. They die, just like the girl.

"I've forgotten too much to know."