"Just someone's house? You could do so much worse than a house." Try the entire universe. Or even Westview itself—
But he hasn't pried, hasn't forced Wanda to tell him everything about what happened back there. She'll talk in her own time. At the question of what he's done, Stephen tips his shoulder into a noncommittal shrug. "Mm. Buy me a drink at the Bar With No Doors and maybe I'll tell you about it."
It's not flirting, exactly — but a perpetual tongue-in-cheek flippancy which, at first blush, doesn't seem like it ought to fit with a Master of the Mystic Arts. Chalk it down to his unconventional entryway to the paranormal. He's always been a little mouthy, a little playful, even when he was gloved and bloodied and hands-deep in someone's spine in the middle of an operating room.
She'd known he hadn't been joking around about the bar. Even though she's come to know that Strange likes his dry quips every now and then, she does think that there had been an endgame in sight. Go to a bar, enjoy themselves, possibly sing very bad karaoke and either remember the tone-deafness or be granted the luxury of not remembering the other had embarrassed themselves at all.
But she can't help the trepidation she feels. New York bustles with people. It's louder than Westview, significantly noisier than her Sokovian cabin. She's still getting used to swimming in a vast sea packed with so many fish.
If he didn't trust her, she doesn't think he'd be gently pushing it.
"A glass of water will do?" She smiles, then feigns concern, "I wouldn't want to embarrass you by drinking you under the table."
"Oh, is that how it is?" Stephen's attention finally slips to the side; he cranes his head and looks at her fully, bemused. "Here I am, helping you out of the goodness of my heart, and all I get is mockery in return. The injustice."
His distraction takes its toll a moment later: down the hall, he can feel the door to the kitchen creak and whine. Some water is starting to seep through the hinges, trickling onto the tile floor. Wong is the most talented chef of the resident sorcerers; he's going to murder them all if his kitchen is ruined. So after a second, Stephen shores up the edges of the spell again, fortifying the boundaries, holds it steady once more.
It's a matter of willpower, more than anything, and he's always been bullishly good on willpower.
"Anyway, I've already been humiliated in a drinking competition, so I'm not eager for a repeat. I don't recommend going up against an Asgardian, in case you were wondering."
Despite being an Avenger, there's a handful of her teammates she doesn't know. Wanda suspects that's not how teams as tight and integral as the Avengers should function, but, then again, Stark had been at the helm. She wouldn't be surprised if he had ensured she remained benched. She's grateful since joining Strange and Wong that neither of them seems to have a bench for her to sit on.
She keeps her gaze on Strange and purses her lips thoughtfully. The water continues to lower. Even distracted, it still obeys her one simple command: go.
"Hm. I always thought that his muscles would absorb all the alcohol." Then she taps her own small bicep, her fingers glowing red while the water continues to leave the Sanctum. "You..." She eyes him and shakes her head. "Tiny, tiny sticks for arms. I can see why you would lose to him."
The sorcerer laughs, startled but amused. It's true: compared to some of the physical specimens on that team, he's practically spindly. Tall but lean, and clearly built more for the library than the gym. He taps his greying temple with an index finger. "I use my brain, Maximoff, which is a far more powerful muscle."
A pause. No, he can't let that sit. With a fleeting, mock-pained look, he continues: "Actually, that's false. The most powerful muscle in the human body is the heart, if we go by the definition of performing the most physical work in a lifetime — or the masseter, our jaw muscle, if we go by exerting maximum force on an external object. Anyway. Point stands, yes, it was Thor, yes mead was involved, and no, I'm not getting into it."
Stephen's chatty, apparently, once you get him going. He practically couldn't shut up when he'd first arrived at Kamar-Taj; kept interrupting group meditation sessions with quips, jokes, commentary. No wonder it had gotten on the other sorcerers' nerves so well.
"What did you do? Did you bet him that you had better hair?"
Considering Thor once had very long hair that Wanda thought was scraggly, she would give Strange the win in that department. Since then, Thor's cleaned up with a more modern haircut.
Hm. No. She doesn't think Strange would bet something so trivial. Narrowing her eyes, she studies him for a long moment. The problem with him is that looks tended to be very deceiving. She'd have imagined him to be strict and humourless, but she's found him to be as funny as Pietro on his good days. Unlike Vision, he doesn't miss much.
If he was to challenge Thor to a drinking match, it'd be over something unpredictable. Maybe silly. Definitely unexpected.
"Was it who wore red best? I like his cape, but I think I like yours a lot more." It is, after all, a sentient being. She likes how it seems to appear when he needs it like a good and weathered friend.
He blinks and the spell twitches again. "That did come up, actually. We swapped cloaks. The Cloak of Levitation tried to strangle him, so I think I came out fine overall, but he did outdrink me so some drunk portalling may have resulted. This is, of course, highly sensitive information."
Stephen had never lived at the Avengers compound like Wanda had — the Sorcerer Supreme had always been an ally, rather than an official member of the team — but his paths had crossed with them often enough. Turns out when you help a Norse god track down his missing father, you remain in his general good books and get invited to his next party. And Thor was the most fun Avenger: interactions with the god had been more friendly than Strange's few bristling interactions with Tony Stark, at least.
The water is retreating and retreating, and it's almost gone: the legs of the credenza and the chairs have settled onto the floor of the foyer again, touching solid ground once more.
And since the topic's come up, he indulges in some curiosity.
"Is the team still..." He doesn't really know how to broach this delicately. But Strange doesn't make a habit of sugarcoating things, either, so in the end he doesn't. "Is the team still much of a thing, after Stark's death?"
Now, that's a question that keeps Wanda's gaze focused straight ahead. She wishes for some of the water to rise again, and although it does bubble as if interested in meeting her command, she ensures that none of it reappears in the Sanctum. His furniture is already ruined enough by her attempts at controlled and less chaotic magic.
Any mention of Stark will always make something prickle uncomfortably in her chest. After everything she's done, after every chance she thought Stark would take to be the hero his friends and teammates claimed him to be, she's still standing where she started her Avengers journey in the rubble of Sokovia. Attending his funeral didn't bring about the closure she had been secretly hoping for.
"I wouldn't know," she says, ensuring to keep a small smile on her face. The Avengers seem to still exist in spirit, but given the lack of phone calls and invitations to team lunches, Wanda thinks it's over. It has to be. While she may never have truly belonged with them and was always either commandeered to her room or the corner, the idea of them meeting and plotting without her stings a little.
"I think Sam and Barnes are working together if the news is telling the truth. But I don't think the Avengers have reunited since the funeral." The funeral that wasn't for Vision, and technically didn't seem to belong to Natasha, too.
Glancing at Strange, she shrugs, "I think they all lost hope after Steve and Iron Man."
Wanda's good at mustering her shield back into place, but that smile still feels like fragile-spun glass, on the verge of splintering. And he almost immediately regrets his words.
(He wasn't always capable of that kind of regret. He used to leave people stinging and humiliated in his wake, and never bothered with something as quotidian as other people's feelings. Nowadays, though—)
"Well," the sorcerer says, and clears his throat. "He always was the more inspirational Steve, by all accounts."
It's a bit of useless pithy humour, to try to paper over that stilted little moment. But they're reaching the end of their cleanup: the shattered-mosaic look of the flooring is starting to return to view, visible once more through those last inches of water as it drains away. The distraction is petering away with it, and he's just left with this: his words, his hands, and he's never quite sure what to do with those meager tools. Should he offer a companionable clap to the shoulder? An apology if he stepped all over a sore subject? Just ignore it and press on?
He's never been very good at this.
In the end, Strange settles for what little olive branch he can offer. "Anyway, it's a moot point from where I'm standing. You'll always have a place here, if you want it."
She can't help her very pleased smile. Wanda turns to look straight ahead and feels the water is gone more than she sees it. Now that she's no longer so focused on ensuring her part of the clean-up is perfect, it's come to her easier. The Sanctum is wet—feels wet and even smells it with the lingering scent of the sea—but it has been successfully cleaned of its water and crabs and most of the sand.
She's grateful for that. The Sanctum has become a refuge, a little home away from home. His words make her feel warm all over… veery similar to how she had felt when she and Vision had seemed to finally find a rhythm that worked in Scotland.
Tilting her head up, she regards Strange with a playful smile. "Even when I pick Wong's Spotify playlist over yours?"
It does seem to be a point of contention between the two sorcerers. (Sometimes Wanda picks the playlist she doesn't want to hear solely for the dramatics of both Strange and Wong.)
He glances over at her and smiles back, a fleeting glimpse of warmth. "Even then, yes. This place accepted me when I was at my worst, which means anyone else is fair game, terrible music taste or not."
Kamar-Taj had taken him in when he was broken, grieving, lashing out at others like an injured dog snapping its teeth. The order had a habit of taking in people who were shattered both literally and figuratively (or perhaps budding sorcerers had a tendency to blow up their own lives; either way, the Sanctum lived up to its name). Considering the type of people who had come and gone through here, Wanda Maximoff piecing herself together fits right in.
Strange walks the rest of the way down the steps then, back onto the floor to survey their work. He nudges some of the sand with the toe of his boot. It's still wet and there'll be water damage, but now that she's done the lion's share of the work, a fellow master should be able to wring the last water particles out of the wood for them. Strange can also assign some novices to sweep up the sand with brooms. (No Fantasia antics, he'd have to remind them. Do it by hand!!)
"Well done," he concludes. "See? No harm, no foul. We didn't open a permanent gateway to the Pacific and flood the city."
Wanda follows him, albeit several steps behind. She's grateful to be at his back so she can hide her wince. His home looks waterlogged in the worst of ways... all thanks to her.
But she's beginning to learn that such thinking isn't accepted here. Mistakes happen, and as Wong has told her numerous times (to the point where his voice has begun to crack from exhaustion), learning to walk comes from stumbling about a thousand times. Wanda thinks she's reached the nine hundred and eightieth stumble.
"Shame it didn't find Atlantis." She laughs.
Glancing around, she wrings her hands together before she pulls them apart. With a flick of her wrists, the windows and doors gently click open and she summons a breeze similar to the one that had dried her wet home in Westview. The wind this time isn't quite as brutal in its intensity. It's a summer breeze that sweeps in and gently taps the legs of drenched chairs and fluffs saturated pillows.
She doesn't particularly want his home to be sagging due to being previously underwater. It wouldn't do for his cape to sit on a dripping rack hook, after all.
Fall, fail, climb, get up, try again. Fuck up again. Try again. Again. It's the way of things here, and no one knows it better than Strange.
When the windows open, he tilts his head backwards and takes a deep breath. The wind is refreshing and nice, sweeping away some of the stuffiness inherent in an aged old building with history steeped into each plank of wood, each tapestry, each mural.
"There's always tomorrow for finding Atlantis," Strange says with a wink. He straightens his soggy collar, then snaps his fingers and all of his clothes dry out in moments. The cloak flicks a coattail, satisfied with the change, no longer looking quite so downtrodden. He swipes distractedly at his forehead where the mindflayer had lashed him, and the cut seals itself up too.
Damage reversed. Summer's on its way, and tomorrow's another day and another, and— dare he think it?— things seem okay.
He exhales. "So. How about that celebratory drink?"
There's always tomorrow here. Wanda keeps expecting her calendar to run out of days, but each time she turns to it, there's always tomorrow and sometimes next week. There are no expiry dates in the Sanctum, even if she thinks there should be.
And there are always invitations, too. Even if she was to try to sideline herself, she knows Strange, Wong and even Strange's mystical cape wouldn't allow it. It's unusual for her to be welcomed and belong, but Wanda doesn't wish to knock it back one too many times.
So, she smiles and nods happily. "I think we deserve it, especially since your walls won't need to be replaced yet."
There's always tomorrow to ruin those.
"Should we call Wong? I think he will come if I ask him." She leans closer to him and playfully whispers, "He likes me more." She does, after all, pick his Spotify playlists.
Before he can think better of it, Strange bats back, warmly and unthinkingly: "Oh, of course he does. Who wouldn't?"
There's a few different ways one could take that statement: that it could be about the near-married-couple bickering between the two sorcerers, their comfortable well-worn dynamic, the way Strange finds ways to needle at his friend's temper. The Spotify war. Stephen Strange's general crotchety nature. So of course Wong would choose her over him.
Or maybe it's just about how eminently likeable Wanda Maximoff is.
He recovers quickly enough (she's essentially a widow, a grieving widow, Stephen—) and papers over that fondness before it can look like anything else. It's only about the Spotify playlists. Of course.
And so he adds, "I'll send him a message, although the duties of the Sorcerer Supreme keep him busy. Sometimes I think he just prefers the Hong Kong Sanctum. The building's fancier."
Readjusting the sling ring on his knuckles, he starts carving out a portal to transport them to the Bar With No Doors.
Despite her best efforts, Wanda blushes. Her own self-perception has been drastically awful. Even in WandaVision where she had every opportunity to demonstrate all the ways she was good—that she wasn't dangerous to society, that she wasn't someone who used her powers to punish anyone—she hid from them as she hid from herself.
She thinks that if anyone can understand that, it's Stephen Strange. She may not know as much about him as she does Tony Stark—despite his medical accomplishments, Strange isn't a billionaire playboy throwing his money around in technology and weapons manufacturing—but from her own observations and inklings... He has a hard time seeing himself in a good light, too. Wanda's concluded that's why she gravitates more toward him than Wong.
Glancing at the way he moves his hands, Wanda looks up at him and studies his profile for a moment.
"How do you deal with that? You were the Sorcerer Supreme before the Snap. Surely, you would be it again?"
There are better times to ask this question. Over dinner. When he's cleaning up one of her messes. Disturbing him when he's reading. But Wanda has never been good with her timing.
It's better to not distract him when he's doing a spell. But if Stephen Strange is as good as they say he is (and as good as Wanda knows him to be), surely, he can multitask.
There's only the slightest pause for a second, a tilt of his head. "I'm bitter about it," Strange says frankly, while he keeps working and multitasking.
This one isn't like the slippery, all-encompassing spell he'd tried for Peter Parker. The portals were the very first bit of magic Strange had ever learned, and the most commonly-used throughout his everyday existence. (Almost to the point of exploitation: such a banal application of magic, using it to grab a snack from the fridge when you were simply too lazy to get off the couch, or popping your head through a portal to pass a message to a startled disciple who shrieked and accidentally dropped the vase they'd been carrying— oops.)
By this point, Strange could do portals in his sleep. So he finishes creating the dimensional gateway, and they can both see through it into a darkened vestibule, an entrance hallway leading towards a bar which, quite literally, has no doors to the outside world. It sits in its own closed-off corner of a dimension, requiring magic to access and to enter.
Then he turns and looks at Wanda, and considers her question more thoroughly. The admission comes delicately. It's not a bit of humility he wants to say to Wong's face, but he can safely say it here to someone else.
"Between you and me, though? Wong's been at this longer than I have — he's more experienced, he was in training at Kamar-Taj long before I arrived, and then he held up the mantle while I was blipped. He inherited it on a technicality, but I inherited it in a crisis. There's not supposed to be room for ego when it comes to the defense of the multiverse. So I like to think we're partners. Co-Sorcerers Supreme." A contemplative pause. "Although maybe I just tell myself that to feel better about losing it."
No matter how many times he creates a portal, Wanda always regards it with wonderment. This portal is no different to the last. She can feel that magic; it's the same as the one Wong appears and disappears into. It's solid and confident, and Wanda doesn't doubt that if she was to step on its threshold that it would hold her until she was ready to take a step into the Bar with No Doors.
Even though she doesn't take a step forward to scrutinise it, she looks at it with curiosity to ensure that it is, in fact, a bar. Not that she would know if it was the right one. While she may trust Strange to not lead her astray, Wanda is still out of place and much a square trying to fit in with a coven of circles.
She instantly sees that it lives up to its name.
But she doesn't step forward, slightly worried that if she does, this conversation will be lost and Strange will be left lingering on a slightly more vulnerable than usual note.
"I don't think you truly lost it." She presses her lips together and shakes her head as if that is that. As if the Sorcerer Supreme title is something that can still exist between two people—and she thinks it can. Just because the other sorcerers may look to Wong now doesn't mean Strange holds it any less.
"It doesn't seem like something like a pen that you can lose." Wanda shrugs and regards the portal as if it's more than a basic display of magic. "Does a sorcerer who used to be Sorcerer Supreme stop being Sorcerer Supreme? I don't think so. It's like how a general stays a general even after he's retired."
And a hero stays a hero even long after he's succumbed to his bullet wounds.
"And how presidents are still referred to as Mr. President even after their term has ended? I'll still be Mr. Sorcerer Supreme?" The corner of his mouth twitches into a smile — a little sardonic, as ever, but he feels some vise in his chest loosen slightly, appreciating the words of reassurance. It's good to hear.
"Thank you for that, though. But ah, if only I were close to retirement. I think my watch is just beginning."
He actually doesn't know how long he went up against Dormammu; it could have been subjective centuries, which makes his whole tenure feel strange (ha) and immeasurable. He's been on the job both forever and not longat all. Time works in gnarled, tangled ways around here.
He tries to shake off his contemplative mood like he's shaking out his coat, shaking off the dust, the sea water. He throws an arm out to the portal, the red cloak draped theatrically from his sleeve. "After you, miss Maximoff."
Tentatively stepping through the portal (her uncertainty doesn't stem from the belief his portal would be flimsy; she's simply not used to travelling through them, no matter how many she may step through), she ensures to move out of the way so Strange and his cape can sweep in after her.
The Bar with No Doors is strange to be inside. It's exactly as she had imagined it—doorless. Funny how truly literal the name actually is. Wanda's so used to titles and names being, well... either on the nose or simply don't match the person or establishment. But she imagines the lack of doors is to keep those who aren't magical users out. What better way to keep the magical underground a secret than to simply make it impossibly hard for those who aren't magical to enter?
"So, everyone in here is a..." She furrows her brows. Most of the patrons appear so... normal. "I've never seen this many." Wanda's never been around this many magic users ever.
To say Wanda's a touch overwhelmed would be a tiny understatement.
The bar isn't as crowded as a regular Manhattan bar at happy hour — thankfully the patrons aren't packed in cheek-by-jowl, crammed in against each other, having to shout to be heard — but there's still more than you'd ever expect, when you were born into a civilian life and hadn't fully grasped just how much magic there was in the wide universe. The fact that it's not Earth-bound helps: there are aliens, a few Asgardian witches in the back (who nod to Strange as he appears), and someone at the end of the counter who's just an incorporeal floating spirit from the astral plane, sipping on some kind of gaseous drink. There's even a couple disciples from Kamar-Taj in their traditional red robes, and they jolt at the sight of Strange and Wanda, spines straightening, trying to look like they're on their best behaviour. He ignores them.
"I didn't believe in magic. Even when I saw it for the very first time, I thought I'd been dosed with LSD." Standing beside Wanda, he sounds a little bemused. He'd grown inured to it, but looking at the bar now and imagining how it must look like to her, he's struck by the novelty all over again. "It didn't exactly track with the life I'd had before. But then a door opens, and—" Strange gestured at the room. "You start getting accustomed to things like this."
For being a magical speakeasy, it looks... astonishingly like a tiki bar. There's palm fronds and eclectic decor everywhere, and no single lamp looks the same as another.
Not bad. Not horrible. Not discomforting. With what Strange has said in mind, Wanda looks around again and takes it in for what it is. It's a piece of solace amongst a crazy and tightly tangled mess of a world. She's only begun to explore the surface of magic, and yet she knows that there's so much more to it than what she's discovered thus far.
She smiles contentedly. "It's a lot quieter than the Compound." That large building had been quiet in ways that rang loudly in Wanda's ears. The silence was always a loud and discomforting reminder of how alone she was in the United States. Being here… while it's noisier than the Compound had been when most of the Avengers were not in town, it's quiet.
It's comfortable.
"Where do you usually sit?" Rising to the tips of her toes, this time when she looks around, it's to try and discern the best spot. Strange seems like a bar type of person… and a shadowy corner type of person, too.
"This is quieter? I thought the Avengers Compound was supposed to be massive. Spread-out." He had only seen it the once: the day it was destroyed during the Battle of Earth, the day they won, the day he sent Tony Stark to die. Strange had held back a lake over the wreckage of that building, all twisted metal and collapsed storeys, and he'd only been able to imagine what it had looked like in its prime.
"And that's my favourite corner," Strange says, leading the way towards it, the slightly fire-blackened table (what had happened there?) with its wobbly chairs. "You can see the entrance, such as it is."
He'd been more for the bar counter, once upon a time: schmooze and be seen. He hadn't been a playboy as a neurosurgeon — simply hadn't the time for it, there was a reason his last fling was someone he worked with — but he'd still been flashy. Spending money, buying drinks for his coworkers, chatting to a group. Nowadays, though, he likes to take a backseat. Sit somewhere he can keep an eye on things.
Wanda follows him, looking around as she does so. She wants to take it all in, and absorb it so that it feels familiar to her. It makes sense to her as to why he picked this corner; seeing the entrance is important. Despite being able to read the minds of anyone, Wanda's always preferred having her back to the wall and her face towards the door. There's always the opportunity to miss out on the one voice that's too quiet and subtle and dangerous.
She sits opposite him and rests her elbows against the table, steepling her fingers together. She rests her chin on her hands and surveys the bar from this angle. She can see almost everything from this corner. Does every other corner have the same vantage point? A part of her is hopeful she'll be able to find out.
With her gaze lingering on the bar, she smiles a touch sheepishly. "Will you judge me if I say wine? I know it's boring, but it's how I judge a place. If it has good wine..." She comes back.
It'd been something fun she'd employed when sneaking around with Vision before, well... everything. It's a piece of that time she likes to keep active and in her embrace.
"I don't judge. It sounds like a fine enough metric," Strange says. He's settled back in his seat — only for an expression of surprise to cross his face as he accidentally sits on the cloak, and it recoils like he's trod on a cat's tail, and they wrestle with each other for a second, then finally get comfortable when the cloak settles over the back of his chair. He straightens his sleeves as if the undignified moment never happened. (This is a common occupational hazard.)
"On my end, I usually drink a single malt scotch in the city, but here, I always get the mai tai."
After they order and when it eventually shows up, it's going to be in the most obnoxious tiki drink vessel like some ancient carved wooden idol, with a bright straw and colourful umbrella, the liquid smoking mystically for no apparent reason. It's fantastic.
He's eased in with an elbow slung over the back of his chair, surveying her. There's often something watchful and assessing in Strange's gaze when he looks at Wanda. Not like he's tiptoeing around a bomb about to go off (which so many people had done, handling her with kid gloves after Sokovia, Lagos, the Raft, Westview) — more like she's a Rubik's cube he's still trying to sort out.
"The bartender's usually a low-level telepath. We can just project our drink orders to them," he adds.
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But he hasn't pried, hasn't forced Wanda to tell him everything about what happened back there. She'll talk in her own time. At the question of what he's done, Stephen tips his shoulder into a noncommittal shrug. "Mm. Buy me a drink at the Bar With No Doors and maybe I'll tell you about it."
It's not flirting, exactly — but a perpetual tongue-in-cheek flippancy which, at first blush, doesn't seem like it ought to fit with a Master of the Mystic Arts. Chalk it down to his unconventional entryway to the paranormal. He's always been a little mouthy, a little playful, even when he was gloved and bloodied and hands-deep in someone's spine in the middle of an operating room.
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But she can't help the trepidation she feels. New York bustles with people. It's louder than Westview, significantly noisier than her Sokovian cabin. She's still getting used to swimming in a vast sea packed with so many fish.
If he didn't trust her, she doesn't think he'd be gently pushing it.
"A glass of water will do?" She smiles, then feigns concern, "I wouldn't want to embarrass you by drinking you under the table."
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His distraction takes its toll a moment later: down the hall, he can feel the door to the kitchen creak and whine. Some water is starting to seep through the hinges, trickling onto the tile floor. Wong is the most talented chef of the resident sorcerers; he's going to murder them all if his kitchen is ruined. So after a second, Stephen shores up the edges of the spell again, fortifying the boundaries, holds it steady once more.
It's a matter of willpower, more than anything, and he's always been bullishly good on willpower.
"Anyway, I've already been humiliated in a drinking competition, so I'm not eager for a repeat. I don't recommend going up against an Asgardian, in case you were wondering."
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Despite being an Avenger, there's a handful of her teammates she doesn't know. Wanda suspects that's not how teams as tight and integral as the Avengers should function, but, then again, Stark had been at the helm. She wouldn't be surprised if he had ensured she remained benched. She's grateful since joining Strange and Wong that neither of them seems to have a bench for her to sit on.
She keeps her gaze on Strange and purses her lips thoughtfully. The water continues to lower. Even distracted, it still obeys her one simple command: go.
"Hm. I always thought that his muscles would absorb all the alcohol." Then she taps her own small bicep, her fingers glowing red while the water continues to leave the Sanctum. "You..." She eyes him and shakes her head. "Tiny, tiny sticks for arms. I can see why you would lose to him."
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A pause. No, he can't let that sit. With a fleeting, mock-pained look, he continues: "Actually, that's false. The most powerful muscle in the human body is the heart, if we go by the definition of performing the most physical work in a lifetime — or the masseter, our jaw muscle, if we go by exerting maximum force on an external object. Anyway. Point stands, yes, it was Thor, yes mead was involved, and no, I'm not getting into it."
Stephen's chatty, apparently, once you get him going. He practically couldn't shut up when he'd first arrived at Kamar-Taj; kept interrupting group meditation sessions with quips, jokes, commentary. No wonder it had gotten on the other sorcerers' nerves so well.
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Considering Thor once had very long hair that Wanda thought was scraggly, she would give Strange the win in that department. Since then, Thor's cleaned up with a more modern haircut.
Hm. No. She doesn't think Strange would bet something so trivial. Narrowing her eyes, she studies him for a long moment. The problem with him is that looks tended to be very deceiving. She'd have imagined him to be strict and humourless, but she's found him to be as funny as Pietro on his good days. Unlike Vision, he doesn't miss much.
If he was to challenge Thor to a drinking match, it'd be over something unpredictable. Maybe silly. Definitely unexpected.
"Was it who wore red best? I like his cape, but I think I like yours a lot more." It is, after all, a sentient being. She likes how it seems to appear when he needs it like a good and weathered friend.
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Stephen had never lived at the Avengers compound like Wanda had — the Sorcerer Supreme had always been an ally, rather than an official member of the team — but his paths had crossed with them often enough. Turns out when you help a Norse god track down his missing father, you remain in his general good books and get invited to his next party. And Thor was the most fun Avenger: interactions with the god had been more friendly than Strange's few bristling interactions with Tony Stark, at least.
The water is retreating and retreating, and it's almost gone: the legs of the credenza and the chairs have settled onto the floor of the foyer again, touching solid ground once more.
And since the topic's come up, he indulges in some curiosity.
"Is the team still..." He doesn't really know how to broach this delicately. But Strange doesn't make a habit of sugarcoating things, either, so in the end he doesn't. "Is the team still much of a thing, after Stark's death?"
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Any mention of Stark will always make something prickle uncomfortably in her chest. After everything she's done, after every chance she thought Stark would take to be the hero his friends and teammates claimed him to be, she's still standing where she started her Avengers journey in the rubble of Sokovia. Attending his funeral didn't bring about the closure she had been secretly hoping for.
"I wouldn't know," she says, ensuring to keep a small smile on her face. The Avengers seem to still exist in spirit, but given the lack of phone calls and invitations to team lunches, Wanda thinks it's over. It has to be. While she may never have truly belonged with them and was always either commandeered to her room or the corner, the idea of them meeting and plotting without her stings a little.
"I think Sam and Barnes are working together if the news is telling the truth. But I don't think the Avengers have reunited since the funeral." The funeral that wasn't for Vision, and technically didn't seem to belong to Natasha, too.
Glancing at Strange, she shrugs, "I think they all lost hope after Steve and Iron Man."
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(He wasn't always capable of that kind of regret. He used to leave people stinging and humiliated in his wake, and never bothered with something as quotidian as other people's feelings. Nowadays, though—)
"Well," the sorcerer says, and clears his throat. "He always was the more inspirational Steve, by all accounts."
It's a bit of useless pithy humour, to try to paper over that stilted little moment. But they're reaching the end of their cleanup: the shattered-mosaic look of the flooring is starting to return to view, visible once more through those last inches of water as it drains away. The distraction is petering away with it, and he's just left with this: his words, his hands, and he's never quite sure what to do with those meager tools. Should he offer a companionable clap to the shoulder? An apology if he stepped all over a sore subject? Just ignore it and press on?
He's never been very good at this.
In the end, Strange settles for what little olive branch he can offer. "Anyway, it's a moot point from where I'm standing. You'll always have a place here, if you want it."
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She's grateful for that. The Sanctum has become a refuge, a little home away from home. His words make her feel warm all over… veery similar to how she had felt when she and Vision had seemed to finally find a rhythm that worked in Scotland.
Tilting her head up, she regards Strange with a playful smile. "Even when I pick Wong's Spotify playlist over yours?"
It does seem to be a point of contention between the two sorcerers. (Sometimes Wanda picks the playlist she doesn't want to hear solely for the dramatics of both Strange and Wong.)
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Kamar-Taj had taken him in when he was broken, grieving, lashing out at others like an injured dog snapping its teeth. The order had a habit of taking in people who were shattered both literally and figuratively (or perhaps budding sorcerers had a tendency to blow up their own lives; either way, the Sanctum lived up to its name). Considering the type of people who had come and gone through here, Wanda Maximoff piecing herself together fits right in.
Strange walks the rest of the way down the steps then, back onto the floor to survey their work. He nudges some of the sand with the toe of his boot. It's still wet and there'll be water damage, but now that she's done the lion's share of the work, a fellow master should be able to wring the last water particles out of the wood for them. Strange can also assign some novices to sweep up the sand with brooms. (No Fantasia antics, he'd have to remind them. Do it by hand!!)
"Well done," he concludes. "See? No harm, no foul. We didn't open a permanent gateway to the Pacific and flood the city."
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But she's beginning to learn that such thinking isn't accepted here. Mistakes happen, and as Wong has told her numerous times (to the point where his voice has begun to crack from exhaustion), learning to walk comes from stumbling about a thousand times. Wanda thinks she's reached the nine hundred and eightieth stumble.
"Shame it didn't find Atlantis." She laughs.
Glancing around, she wrings her hands together before she pulls them apart. With a flick of her wrists, the windows and doors gently click open and she summons a breeze similar to the one that had dried her wet home in Westview. The wind this time isn't quite as brutal in its intensity. It's a summer breeze that sweeps in and gently taps the legs of drenched chairs and fluffs saturated pillows.
She doesn't particularly want his home to be sagging due to being previously underwater. It wouldn't do for his cape to sit on a dripping rack hook, after all.
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When the windows open, he tilts his head backwards and takes a deep breath. The wind is refreshing and nice, sweeping away some of the stuffiness inherent in an aged old building with history steeped into each plank of wood, each tapestry, each mural.
"There's always tomorrow for finding Atlantis," Strange says with a wink. He straightens his soggy collar, then snaps his fingers and all of his clothes dry out in moments. The cloak flicks a coattail, satisfied with the change, no longer looking quite so downtrodden. He swipes distractedly at his forehead where the mindflayer had lashed him, and the cut seals itself up too.
Damage reversed. Summer's on its way, and tomorrow's another day and another, and— dare he think it?— things seem okay.
He exhales. "So. How about that celebratory drink?"
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And there are always invitations, too. Even if she was to try to sideline herself, she knows Strange, Wong and even Strange's mystical cape wouldn't allow it. It's unusual for her to be welcomed and belong, but Wanda doesn't wish to knock it back one too many times.
So, she smiles and nods happily. "I think we deserve it, especially since your walls won't need to be replaced yet."
There's always tomorrow to ruin those.
"Should we call Wong? I think he will come if I ask him." She leans closer to him and playfully whispers, "He likes me more." She does, after all, pick his Spotify playlists.
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There's a few different ways one could take that statement: that it could be about the near-married-couple bickering between the two sorcerers, their comfortable well-worn dynamic, the way Strange finds ways to needle at his friend's temper. The Spotify war. Stephen Strange's general crotchety nature. So of course Wong would choose her over him.
Or maybe it's just about how eminently likeable Wanda Maximoff is.
He recovers quickly enough (she's essentially a widow, a grieving widow, Stephen—) and papers over that fondness before it can look like anything else. It's only about the Spotify playlists. Of course.
And so he adds, "I'll send him a message, although the duties of the Sorcerer Supreme keep him busy. Sometimes I think he just prefers the Hong Kong Sanctum. The building's fancier."
Readjusting the sling ring on his knuckles, he starts carving out a portal to transport them to the Bar With No Doors.
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She thinks that if anyone can understand that, it's Stephen Strange. She may not know as much about him as she does Tony Stark—despite his medical accomplishments, Strange isn't a billionaire playboy throwing his money around in technology and weapons manufacturing—but from her own observations and inklings... He has a hard time seeing himself in a good light, too. Wanda's concluded that's why she gravitates more toward him than Wong.
Glancing at the way he moves his hands, Wanda looks up at him and studies his profile for a moment.
"How do you deal with that? You were the Sorcerer Supreme before the Snap. Surely, you would be it again?"
There are better times to ask this question. Over dinner. When he's cleaning up one of her messes. Disturbing him when he's reading. But Wanda has never been good with her timing.
It's better to not distract him when he's doing a spell. But if Stephen Strange is as good as they say he is (and as good as Wanda knows him to be), surely, he can multitask.
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This one isn't like the slippery, all-encompassing spell he'd tried for Peter Parker. The portals were the very first bit of magic Strange had ever learned, and the most commonly-used throughout his everyday existence. (Almost to the point of exploitation: such a banal application of magic, using it to grab a snack from the fridge when you were simply too lazy to get off the couch, or popping your head through a portal to pass a message to a startled disciple who shrieked and accidentally dropped the vase they'd been carrying— oops.)
By this point, Strange could do portals in his sleep. So he finishes creating the dimensional gateway, and they can both see through it into a darkened vestibule, an entrance hallway leading towards a bar which, quite literally, has no doors to the outside world. It sits in its own closed-off corner of a dimension, requiring magic to access and to enter.
Then he turns and looks at Wanda, and considers her question more thoroughly. The admission comes delicately. It's not a bit of humility he wants to say to Wong's face, but he can safely say it here to someone else.
"Between you and me, though? Wong's been at this longer than I have — he's more experienced, he was in training at Kamar-Taj long before I arrived, and then he held up the mantle while I was blipped. He inherited it on a technicality, but I inherited it in a crisis. There's not supposed to be room for ego when it comes to the defense of the multiverse. So I like to think we're partners. Co-Sorcerers Supreme." A contemplative pause. "Although maybe I just tell myself that to feel better about losing it."
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Even though she doesn't take a step forward to scrutinise it, she looks at it with curiosity to ensure that it is, in fact, a bar. Not that she would know if it was the right one. While she may trust Strange to not lead her astray, Wanda is still out of place and much a square trying to fit in with a coven of circles.
She instantly sees that it lives up to its name.
But she doesn't step forward, slightly worried that if she does, this conversation will be lost and Strange will be left lingering on a slightly more vulnerable than usual note.
"I don't think you truly lost it." She presses her lips together and shakes her head as if that is that. As if the Sorcerer Supreme title is something that can still exist between two people—and she thinks it can. Just because the other sorcerers may look to Wong now doesn't mean Strange holds it any less.
"It doesn't seem like something like a pen that you can lose." Wanda shrugs and regards the portal as if it's more than a basic display of magic. "Does a sorcerer who used to be Sorcerer Supreme stop being Sorcerer Supreme? I don't think so. It's like how a general stays a general even after he's retired."
And a hero stays a hero even long after he's succumbed to his bullet wounds.
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"Thank you for that, though. But ah, if only I were close to retirement. I think my watch is just beginning."
He actually doesn't know how long he went up against Dormammu; it could have been subjective centuries, which makes his whole tenure feel strange (ha) and immeasurable. He's been on the job both forever and not longat all. Time works in gnarled, tangled ways around here.
He tries to shake off his contemplative mood like he's shaking out his coat, shaking off the dust, the sea water. He throws an arm out to the portal, the red cloak draped theatrically from his sleeve. "After you, miss Maximoff."
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The Bar with No Doors is strange to be inside. It's exactly as she had imagined it—doorless. Funny how truly literal the name actually is. Wanda's so used to titles and names being, well... either on the nose or simply don't match the person or establishment. But she imagines the lack of doors is to keep those who aren't magical users out. What better way to keep the magical underground a secret than to simply make it impossibly hard for those who aren't magical to enter?
"So, everyone in here is a..." She furrows her brows. Most of the patrons appear so... normal. "I've never seen this many." Wanda's never been around this many magic users ever.
To say Wanda's a touch overwhelmed would be a tiny understatement.
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The bar isn't as crowded as a regular Manhattan bar at happy hour — thankfully the patrons aren't packed in cheek-by-jowl, crammed in against each other, having to shout to be heard — but there's still more than you'd ever expect, when you were born into a civilian life and hadn't fully grasped just how much magic there was in the wide universe. The fact that it's not Earth-bound helps: there are aliens, a few Asgardian witches in the back (who nod to Strange as he appears), and someone at the end of the counter who's just an incorporeal floating spirit from the astral plane, sipping on some kind of gaseous drink. There's even a couple disciples from Kamar-Taj in their traditional red robes, and they jolt at the sight of Strange and Wanda, spines straightening, trying to look like they're on their best behaviour. He ignores them.
"I didn't believe in magic. Even when I saw it for the very first time, I thought I'd been dosed with LSD." Standing beside Wanda, he sounds a little bemused. He'd grown inured to it, but looking at the bar now and imagining how it must look like to her, he's struck by the novelty all over again. "It didn't exactly track with the life I'd had before. But then a door opens, and—" Strange gestured at the room. "You start getting accustomed to things like this."
For being a magical speakeasy, it looks... astonishingly like a tiki bar. There's palm fronds and eclectic decor everywhere, and no single lamp looks the same as another.
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Not bad. Not horrible. Not discomforting. With what Strange has said in mind, Wanda looks around again and takes it in for what it is. It's a piece of solace amongst a crazy and tightly tangled mess of a world. She's only begun to explore the surface of magic, and yet she knows that there's so much more to it than what she's discovered thus far.
She smiles contentedly. "It's a lot quieter than the Compound." That large building had been quiet in ways that rang loudly in Wanda's ears. The silence was always a loud and discomforting reminder of how alone she was in the United States. Being here… while it's noisier than the Compound had been when most of the Avengers were not in town, it's quiet.
It's comfortable.
"Where do you usually sit?" Rising to the tips of her toes, this time when she looks around, it's to try and discern the best spot. Strange seems like a bar type of person… and a shadowy corner type of person, too.
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"And that's my favourite corner," Strange says, leading the way towards it, the slightly fire-blackened table (what had happened there?) with its wobbly chairs. "You can see the entrance, such as it is."
He'd been more for the bar counter, once upon a time: schmooze and be seen. He hadn't been a playboy as a neurosurgeon — simply hadn't the time for it, there was a reason his last fling was someone he worked with — but he'd still been flashy. Spending money, buying drinks for his coworkers, chatting to a group. Nowadays, though, he likes to take a backseat. Sit somewhere he can keep an eye on things.
"What's your poison?"
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She sits opposite him and rests her elbows against the table, steepling her fingers together. She rests her chin on her hands and surveys the bar from this angle. She can see almost everything from this corner. Does every other corner have the same vantage point? A part of her is hopeful she'll be able to find out.
With her gaze lingering on the bar, she smiles a touch sheepishly. "Will you judge me if I say wine? I know it's boring, but it's how I judge a place. If it has good wine..." She comes back.
It'd been something fun she'd employed when sneaking around with Vision before, well... everything. It's a piece of that time she likes to keep active and in her embrace.
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"On my end, I usually drink a single malt scotch in the city, but here, I always get the mai tai."
After they order and when it eventually shows up, it's going to be in the most obnoxious tiki drink vessel like some ancient carved wooden idol, with a bright straw and colourful umbrella, the liquid smoking mystically for no apparent reason. It's fantastic.
He's eased in with an elbow slung over the back of his chair, surveying her. There's often something watchful and assessing in Strange's gaze when he looks at Wanda. Not like he's tiptoeing around a bomb about to go off (which so many people had done, handling her with kid gloves after Sokovia, Lagos, the Raft, Westview) — more like she's a Rubik's cube he's still trying to sort out.
"The bartender's usually a low-level telepath. We can just project our drink orders to them," he adds.
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yrs to wrap? ♥
end!! ♥