sorserer | ( office hours & overflow )

What can I say, you’re more strip steak than beef.

[ he’s never above ribbing, in his own way. but the dryness of his tone is tempered with concentration; he can be seen typing something after a moment--more challenges with implant placement--before he sits back to nurse the shake some more. ]

This is above their pay grade. At least for now. [ a pause, his mouth around the straw turned down a little at the corners. ] Funny how people you don’t work for keep you busy.

Can't say I relate, must be a you kinda problem to have. Maybe you attract it.

[Freeing the straw from the confines of the cup, he lets it point upward between the pinch of his teeth as he plants his chin in his palm and goes quiet for a short while. Long enough for some further thoughts of Stephen's to reach the surface if they're going to before his brow creases with curiosity again.]

... You consulting? Medically, not magically?

Tony’s mostly a mechanical engineer, not biomed. There’s enough overlap on the actual production side of things, but he wanted help making sure he didn’t fry some guy’s head like an egg.

[ he follows the explanation with a silence that could, justifiably, be called brooding. he reaches over to rummage through the bag and picks out one of the hot dogs, tearing a ketchup packet with his teeth afterwards. ]

It’s interesting. [ absolutely resentfully said. ]

[If the straw between Hakkyuu's teeth had been teetering petulantly (it was), it pauses as Stephen comments that he finds this quandary interesting. For a second or two, there's not much to especially read on Hakkyuu face though, not until the edges of his eyes press upward just barely toward what might be considered a smile before he liberates the straw from his mouth to push it back in the cup.]

So what's he actually trying to do?

[ stephen shrugs. it’s as good an effort to remain nonchalant as he’s ever made. ]

Fix something.

[ he takes a bite of his hot dog, chews it over, swallows cleanly. and then, with even more resentment, but more or less the resentment of someone who knows he’s being childish: ]

Help someone.

What?! No! What an asshole!

[A light chuckle rolls through Hakkyuu pretty easily as he reaches into the bag to tug out the fries and a burger before settling back in his seat again.]

Take it this isn't so much the kinda work you did together back home, huh? [He lowers his eyes to gather up some fries with a shrug.] Doubt you'd call it interesting if it was closer to mundane or repetitive.

We didn’t really work together back home.

[ he says it slowly, though, as if he hasn’t really squared this particular circle for himself. he had all day to think about it.

absently he skims his clean hand over his forehead, where his third eye tends to live when in use, then sets his hot dog back down. it’s hard to focus on eating, even though the food smells good. he reaches for the shake again instead. ]

It’s complicated. Even before you factor in that ... I don’t know if he’s the same one. As with the Loki situation.

[ he knows wishful thinking in his own tone when he hears it, but it’s a fact he hangs onto stubbornly. he doesn’t know. at least, he isn’t one hundred percent certain. ]

[Ah. So when Stephen said they were colleagues it's in a loose sense, an approximation. Friends? Maybe. Acquaintances? More likely. Complicated? Well, Stephen didn't really have to say that much since it already seemed obvious from the outset.

I owe him in my timeline, so I admit I’ve made certain concessions.

But a Loki-type situation is a complicated one. A different Tony to the one Stephen knows. Or knew. A Tony who died, one way or another, from what he's gleaned from the minimal amount of information he's shared thus far.

It's a tactic Hakkyuu is familiar with himself--answer the questions factually, but with barely any meat on the bone to feed curiosity. Just as well really because sometimes the meat is just too rotten to stomach anyway.

Some would argue I widowed her.

There's more than a story here though and if Hakkyuu is good at looping details together--which he is--he can assume whatever happened to Tony, Stephen blames himself for.

He chews slowly while the thoughts rattle around in his head, trying to work through the questions all of this draws to the forefront of his mind and then sort out what is just him wanting to know about these gaps in his own knowledge about Stephen versus what is valuable for Stephen.

When he considers it in those terms, only one question matters.]

You wanna talk about it?

[ the answer takes awhile. ]

I haven’t before.

[ with an odd, naked candor. it’s funny, to be seated here, contemplatively drinking an alcoholic milkshake while thinking about the wrongs he righted. about cost, debt. ]

They call it the Infinity War now, back home. In the textbooks, across the universe. Thanos’ war.

[For someone who does his best work at break-neck speeds, Hakkyuu doesn't feel any desire to rush Stephen here. It's an offer, and if it's not something Stephen wants then it's not something he needs to answer.

He narrows one eye slightly as Stephen begins to fill the space between them with words though, some that he's heard before, others he hasn't as he chews on the questions he wants to ask, how he does and doesn't want to prompt Stephen further. He manages, just barely, to resist teasing about Stephen being in a textbook: is there going to be a test at the end, professor?]

What was it? That Infinity War.

[ it’s a good question. the infinity war didn’t feel like a war, not really, if only because stephen had only stepped in towards the end. he’d only known secondhand, and then in visions, the full extent of the destructive swath thanos had cut through the universe; he only tastes the lingering pain in the world in unexpected moments. he stays in his house back home or goes far afield for adventures; even now he doesn’t expect the questioning eyes in the street, the grieving ex-colleague beside him in the church pew. the occasional retrospect on iron man on the newsfeeds, which he can never bring himself to watch.

he hasn’t really-- ]

I haven’t really said it out loud before.

[ everyone knows the story back home. and here, with people from different and diffuse points in his timeline, he’s never had to say.

he rubs his hands together. when he spreads his cupped palms a flock of small blue light butterflies wing their way out in the empty air above the kitchen table. ]

The Mad Titan Thanos and his armies carved their way through my realm for the power he needed to reduce all life in the universe by half.

[ one by one the butterflies begin to dissipate, the flock slowly culling itself by, yes, half. the rest linger, dispersing in the sitting area, stephen’s expression calcifying in increments. ]

Every human life, every alien species. Every ant in every anthill. Half of everything, gone.

[It's not the same, but there's a way that Hakkyuu can relate to the experience of being called on to speak through cataclysmic events. There are reasons why bards and scholars write books and spin stories, exaggerated as they may be at times.

He can recall Sesyria absorbing the responsibility of chronically events of the guild, all with the craftsmanship of military-trained personnel producing a factual report in a play-by-play manner, noting instances of success, of failure, of injury, of loss, all with a detached and clinical approach that included even matter-of-fact assessments of expectations for mental and emotional recovery. In a way, that's how Sesyria has always been, for as long as Hakkyuu has known him, and on the other hand he also gets how in order to recount the events that have unfolded, Sesyria necessarily needs to shield himself to remain steadfast.

Stephen would like Sesyria, Hakkyuu realises quite suddenly, but more than that right now he understands this approach, both from watching and from attempting to tell sweeping tales of chronic and unavoidable loss himself. It's hard to speak atrocities into the air.

Still and quiet, he watches Stephen conjure his magical illustration of the point he's making, the sky-blue butterflies so unlike the ones that routinely pepper Vrenille's magic. And the sinking feeling when they begin to obliterate. Or at least it starts as a sinking feeling, somewhere in the pit of his stomach that then moves into the lower regions of his chest.]

They... killed half of everything?

[Its a disbelieving kind or echo, the sort that arrives with Hakkyuu's automatic pragmatism that immediately sweeps through trying to imagine such a task, not just from the perspective of being motivated to do it (why?! is a trite question for instigators of genocide), but the sheer magnitude and sense of dedication needed to it. Working through worlds, culling half of everything. Every sentient and non-sentient being. He takes Stephen at his word too and that's where the pedantic confusion sets in along with a head-tilted frown.]

How? They just... went from world to world, guessed what half of life on that planet would be and, what, wiped them out and moved on?

[He sucks in a breath, trying not to let it sound loud and sharp as his mind just continues down the logical route.]

They... came to earth. They did that to your earth?

[Some pieces are starting to fit together inside Hakkyuu's head, he just doesn't know they're quite not the right ones yet, or even how very much he's still missing.]

[ it’s unfortunate, that he doesn’t think he can sit down for this either. part of him wants to pace in tighter and tighter circles, something he might do if he were alone albeit uncharacteristically; part of him wants to lay down and never say another word on the subject again, at least for personal reasons. for now, ever the pragmatist, stephen rises--the food temporarily forgotten--so he can head to the kitchen. weirdly, he washes his hands first: he knows he’s going to take a break from eating, at least for the next few minutes. over the sink, over the running water, his voice can be heard with its perfect dryness: ]

Apparently he did it manually first. Planet after planet, among distant stars. [ he emerges from the kitchen and leans against the doorway. his expression is even, though distant. he has a small towel now with which he’s absently drying his hands off. ] But when he set his sights on Earth at last it was because he knew we harbored some of the tools he would need to do it across the realm in its entirety, with a-- [ he does it demonstratively, joylessly ] --snap of his fingers.

[ the gesture stings a little, and not for the usual reasons it might for a man with aching joints. children learn to do it at each other on playgrounds sometimes now as mocking threat, and then they unlearn the habit when they find what it took from the rest of the world, like rolling back with abruptness the inclination to swear. ]

I carried one such tool awhile. On the cusp of his victory, I called on its power myself. To look through time. Fourteen million futures. In each of them he succeeded in his task.

[ stephen folds his arms next, the towel hanging loosely from his fingertips; his flat gaze is turned sideways and unseeing, as if watching his secrets step into the light on their own. i statements ring different in a silent room when they’re admissions of guilt or shame or unimaginable, irresponsible power. ]

I found the one future in fourteen million where it wasn’t all permanent. I made the call. Gave Thanos what he needed, dragged my universe mourning and wailing through incalculable loss, that I might someday reverse his will ...

[ he trails. he tosses the hand towel sideways onto the kitchen counter. ]

Five years later I returned from the dead, along with the rest. To see through what I set in motion. It was the Avengers who performed the mass resurrection. The Avengers, who won the war.

[Something Hakkyuu routinely measures in the world is a sense of resilience to bad shit in life. It's no secret he has little time for delicacy around how tough and unfair life can be and has virtually no space for sympathy or pity. For as thrashing and blindly mean as Stephen had been in his time of recent injury, he was very right about one thing in particular: And if I had need of comfort. I certainly know better than to ask it of you.

It's echo that's cooled from a harsh sting into in a dull ache like a healing bruise now, and in any case this isn't about Hakkyuu's relative hurt or not--it's about how his capacity for soft care is virtually null.

That doesn't mean his emotional intelligence is shot or that he doesn't feel anything for others, it's just assessed proportionately. And what Hakkyuu assesses from this is downright horrific on ever single level.

At some point, he stands up too, one hand resting stupidly, purposelessly on the counter as he stares at Stephen with a kind of stricken expression. There's so much in this. Too much for any singular person to hold. And yet there he is: Stephen Strange, one man, with fourteen billion iterations of failure all on his shoulders and a single, solitary glimmer of hope; one tiny speck of glitter in mountains of black sand.

It's not often that Hakkyuu is stunned speechless or doesn't have immediate access to some remark that slices down right to the bone right off the mark, but there is a silence that follows. Several long seconds first for absolute disbelief, the awful icy sickness all coiled around his guts for what that must mean for Stephen specifically, and then for the way his mind rapidly files things into place. Stephen can probably see it all happen in real time, the moment of shift between sharp-breathed shock, several quick blinks to clear his glassy vision, the way his eyes flicker involuntarily side to side and tense and relax as he mentally asks questions and dismisses them.

It's all very quick in reality until he refocuses on Stephen again, various threads linking up in cerebral cartography as he lands on the crux of things here.

I owe him in my timeline--

Some would argue I widowed her.

He doesn’t know I owe him.

I made the call.]

... Tony was the cost.

... he was there when I gave Thanos the Time Stone. He had to be. I’d foreseen it. He asked why. I couldn’t tell him to trust me, or that it’d be alright. I knew because I’d tried before, and ...

[ his jaw clenches briefly, as if in consternation. ]

I tried a lot of things.

[ a vague statement. hard to say how much he really remembers, how much of it gets muddled in with his dreams. ]

Five years later ... he has the opening, and he knows it’ll kill him. He looks to me, across a battlefield. He has a wife by then, a young daughter. He wants there to be another way. There isn’t.

[ in the silence that follows he doesn’t move, still at his stringbean lean against the doorframe. he’s in a simple tee and sweats. honestly, it’s kind of funny to be talking such horrors in his little leased house with a best friend and a table full of fast food. funny to be alive at all, to be in a universe that forces him to receive drone donuts from the dead.

he moves to scrub his face, a gesture that suddenly becomes his hand simply spread over his eyes without his explicit consent. behind his closed eyelids there are flickers again, visions that no longer serve any purpose, and then, mortifyingly, a prickle of telling warmth. as if he’d had anyone to grieve back then. as if guilt isn’t self-serving, pointless. he takes another moment to corral the sudden unexpected swell of emotion, to pull it all in under what he knows now to be his will, vast and by necessity unending.

finally he says, calmly-- ]

I am aware I’m not thinking about this clearly.

[The thing that thunders most strongly in Hakkyuu's mind is the immediate sense of isolation related to all this. Sure, he could try and force himself to give more of a shit about Tony's ultimate end and of the lives left behind in a scattered tragedy, but he doesn't know Tony Stark. He doesn't even know Iron Man.

He does know Stephen. Not just as a person, but as an entity and Hakkyuu can imagine how he's dealt with all of this so far and what the ghost of someone walking around and sending him confectionery must be doing.

At some point, closing the gap between them is just inevitable, even as it walks the hair-thin line of crowding Stephen in what must a suffocating moment. Hakkyuu isn't exactly known for avoiding risks though as his stares up into Stephen's hand-covered face, then reaches with both hands to slowly, carefully, lay his palms either side of Stephen's neck. He doesn't need Stephen to think clearly. Who in the ever-loving could, or even should be approaching any of this from the perspective of clarity? It's a actual wonder that Stephen's mind is actually in tact at all.]

And you... carried all this shit with you. Alone. All this time.

[Still not a question, just a statement of clarification, something that tugs all edges of his throat into a tight knot that makes it hard to breathe and think but makes all his insides ache.]

Stephen...

... it’s fine. It couldn’t have gone any other way.

[ or could it have? he has a broader understanding of the multiverse now than he used to; he has the darkhold. there are other practitioners in duplicity who might better show him how to command power. maybe a day will come when he’ll reach again through time, wind back the clock on the scar thanos left in the universe, maybe even--

enough, he thinks. enough.

it couldn’t have gone any other way. ]

Sorry.

[ poor word choice. he means sorry about his loss of composure. he’d wanted to say it then too, on the barren and silent battlefield, but the space immediately following tony’s death was naturally reserved for his loved ones, not the man who had tied him to the trolley rail and pulled the lever. he’d said it at tony stark’s funeral, to his widow, who was of course the type of woman who never blamed him even when the world over learned it was his play. he’s said it in the streets to strangers with drawn expressions; he said it to dr. west in the church pews, about his cats and his brother-- ]

Shit.

[ angry too, now, about cracks in the ice, behind which is that incalculable loss, his drifting sister--he presses the heels of his hands in his eyes-- ]

Hey.

[Marginally, he increases the pressure where his hands sit on Stephen's neck as he clears off the cracks at the edges of his own voice to fall back in line with something firmer, more in-line with his usual tone. Stephen doesn't need to catch more of the upset in Hakkyuu's voice and it's self-indulgent anyway--no amount of what Hakkyuu feels changes what has happened to and around Stephen.

Stephen doesn't need comfort, he needs an anchor before he ends up going too far out.]

Look at me.

[ there’s a second where it feels like he really, really can’t. too many pictures behind his eyelids, difficult conversations held in rapid succession, visions of other futures like oil slick drops in a deep murky pond--

and guilt, the type he usually takes pains to avoid thinking about, and the enormity of it all--you text while driving one time and then, years later, weigh in the hand the life of a man--

he lets out an anguished breath that cuts out short, before it can become a sob. and then he drags his hands away by force, swiping over his, yes, wet eyes. he looks away rather than ahead. his pulse beats hard in the side of his neck. ]

I, um. I can’t.

[ can’t what? look hakkyuu in the eyes right now, think about any of this. he tries not to think about any of this, except in exact terms. he did what he had to do and people were restored to their homes, their loved ones, their space among the stars. never mind the interim losses, the stains grief leaves behind, the martyrs he personally made. surely it’s enough to have made the right call. the only call. stephen strange, always holding the knife. ]

[Guilt is a temptation for the best of people, for anyone who cares even a little bit about people.

And Stephen cares. For all his displays of being aloof and dismissive and callous, he cares. Which makes him susceptible to exactly this.

Hakkyuu's also not exempt from guilt and he can feel its spindly sharp legs creeping up the back of his neck as he looks into Stephen's anguished face: you did this, you pushed and poked, and now look what you fucking did.

What Hakkyuu does have though is another internal voice, one that's much louder right now that tells the first to fuck off, that this isn't about him, it's about fourteen billion forms of pain all driven down into a pinhead of one man who Stephen, by necessity, couldn't save.

The specificity of what Stephen can't do is also, in its way, inconsequential, not in the sense that it doesn't matter, just that Hakkyuu doesn't need to know the specific shape of it.

Instead, he strokes his thumbs slowly, rhythmically against Stephen's neck, feeling the harsh beats of proof of life beneath the touch.]

Don't do this to yourself, Stephen. Don't take the choices others made and turn every little strand into a noose to hang yourself with. You seeing all the shit you did? That's not you orchestrating even a single one of those outcomes. You're not responsible for them.

[He pauses the rhythm of the touch, head tilting slightly to try and find Stephen's eyeline even if he can't find Hakkyuu's himself.]

You hear me?

[ the usual stillness of stephen’s expression keeps trying to reassert itself. his gaze rests on nothing in particular. down the hallway, maybe, at the corner of a picture frame, at some unseen mote of dust. he’s trying to focus, to come back from that other place. from fourteen million, six hundred and five other places.

he shuts his eyes again, brows drawing together, as his hands find their way onto hakkyuu’s forearms, long fingers folding over pale skin. he doesn’t push him away, just hangs onto him loosely, his head bending somewhat towards him, towards the contact, more reminders of life. ]

... I don’t think that’s true.

[ his voice lower, and more raw, because--that’s it. a single and anchoring truth. he cut something vital out of the world. they put a memorial up in manhattan. ]

It’s fine. [ it is. he needs to leash it again, whatever remains of his despair, the grave and depthless chasm of his responsibility. ] It’s alright.

Of course you don't...

[A touch is a good start. He'll take a touch.

What's more difficult is the place he can see Stephen's brain going and it's compartmentlised denial rather than anything that helps to carry that load. And now there are two ghosts of Stephen's heart walking around the city.

It's not just that Stephen needs to hold the knife, he has to fall on it too.]

How did you kill him?

[It's such an abrupt question that it even makes Hakkyuu's muscles clench, but he can't think of any other way to get to a very particular point that's rattling around louder and louder in Hakkyuu's head.]

You think it's not true, so tell me how you killed him. Did you shoot him? Stab him? Did you use magic to obliterate him?

[He doesn't actually want Stephen to think too much about that and moves his hands to cover the sorcerer's already resting on him.]

If the answer isn't anything other than a definitive 'yes,' then it's a no. [And he gives a light squeeze and a soft, humourless huff of a laugh.] Take it from someone who can answer 'yes' to all of those questions and so many more so many times over... you're no killer, Stephen. You're not even close.

[ stephen wants to argue. the fact can be seen in the little deepening furrow in his tight scowl, the way his jaw tightens at the words.

he wants to say he understands the distinction. hakkyuu, he knows, is someone who watches the life leave people’s eyes with the cool remove of a consummate killer; he’s had blood on his hands, even revels in it on occasion. this isn’t the same as stephen with his gift of prophecy, his third eye and inordinate power, his setting up elaborate houses of cards so they can fall with surreal force on one person only.

but there are gradations to these things too. this is something stephen believes, even to his own detriment. he didn’t put the glove on tony’s hand, except for where he did. it only matters up to a point that he did it to end a war. ]

Hakkyuu.

[ it’s the only thing he can manage, the low plea to leave it be. it’s not a question he can adjudicate fully right now; he wonders if he ever will. his hands slide up further to cover hakkyuu’s. he folds their fingers together. ]

[It's not like his name is being said a warning, though he can hear the request to haul clearly enough. Digging in deeper isn't what Stephen needs, especially when Hakkyuu can tell the point has been made well enough that Stephen, at the very least, isn't looking to argue with him right now.

This will come up again, zombie-like and putrid, clawing at Stephen's humanity and demanding more and more and more of it. Hakkyuu, now he knows this about Stephen's time on earth, can picture this trajectory so clearly.

So he needs to be something else in the long term, not a stick to beat Stephen's already battered and torn self, but something that helps his feet find the ground again when everything is crumbling around. It's not really a decision Hakkyuu makes, not really a matter or weighing the possibilities or the implications, it's just something he already knows he's willing to do. In reality, there are very few limits to what he'd do for Stephen though and if he ever let his mind wander, it would just reveal that has been true probably since the day they met.

But for now, he lets his shoulders sag, all the will to fight the sorcerer's own demons draining out of him as he leans up to shove his forehead right up against Stephen's, firm and solid along with a short huffed sigh.]

Yeah, yeah...

[ through the clearing stormclouds of his regret stephen’s lip twitches helplessly at the headbutt. he tilts his own head in a way that nearly puts them in kissing distance but not quite. he’s--well, he’ll be more appropriately grateful soon enough, when he can stop his mind ricocheting between his infinity war, tony stark, the haze of all those memories. for now, while there’s lingering melancholy in his eyes, he’s regaining his footing. every point of contact helps. ]

... so I need you to be nice to the drones.

( office hours & overflow )

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