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"Are you happy?" Christine asked softly.
Stephen gave her a wide smile. "Of course I am. I'm happy."
"Good-"
He thought he was home-free...
"-but you know you could have more."
Stephen looked away from her, idly swirling the content of his glass a little. A martini. Extra dry, extra dirty. With olives.
"Stephen?" Christine placed a hand on his arm. "It's been four years. Please. Move on and let yourself be really happy."
"I am happy," he repeated, but he couldn't stop staring at his glass. She used to hate olives.
"Stephen-"
"Congrats, Christine," he interrupted, giving her a smile that was genuine, even if it was tinged with something decidedly not-happy. "You deserve this." He leaned in, kissing her cheek briefly, and turned towards the balcony, walking away before she could stop him. This was why he'd avoided meeting Christine too much- she could always see right through him. The only other person who could do that was...
"Wait, Toni Stark is dead in this world?" America seemed shocked and the look she gave Stephen was unsettling.
Stephen didn't notice, because he was too busy giving a full-body flinch at hearing that name. He'd been doing such a good job lately, at avoiding thinking about her, pretending to be okay and-
"Stephen?" Wong asked, clearing his throat.
"I'm fine," he snapped, throwing a sharp look at him.
"Relive your best memories at a discounted price," a robotic voice said. "Let us remember for you."
Stephen should have kept moving. Instead, he froze, watching the faintly translucent scene play out before him.
He stood back for a few moments, watching as Toni's fingers flew like silk over the piano keys, some Italian composition she'd picked out specifically for the wedding, for Pepper and Happy to dance to. When the song came to an end, Stephen walked over to her, placing his gloved hands over her bare shoulders.
"Dance with me?" He asked.
"Thought you didn't like dancing," she teased, but took his hand and stood.
"Not when it's with you." He led her out to the dance floor, hands at her waist as they simply swayed along to the music that FRIDAY was playing now. He couldn't look away from her, entranced by the way her silvery dress caught the soft amber lights and made her seem like she was glowing.
"You sure about this?" Toni asked quietly when Stephen told her about Pepper's request of wanting them to go public on their relationship. “I don’t mind waiting for some time more. Because once we do this, they are not going to let it rest for months. So, really, it’s okay if-”
"I love you," Stephen interrupted. He disentangled one hand from hers, shaking fingers stroking back a loose strand of hair from her face.
The look on Toni's face was awed, wonderstruck, and just as in love- Stephen didn't know how he turned out so lucky after everything.
She kissed him- he clutched at her as strongly as he could, kissing back, pouring every ounce of emotion into it that he held for her.
Stephen stepped out of the circle. "This is a waste of time," he said in a rough voice.
"Can I ask you something?" Stephen wondered out loud. "What happened to T-Toni in your world?"
America gave him a look, as if to say that his badly faked nonchalance wouldn't fool a three-year-old. "You never really said. She was trained in the Mystic Arts too, but she didn't seem to like using it. As far as I could tell, you guys had some huge disagreement about it- I think maybe you wanted her to use magic to keep herself safer but she wanted to stick to her suit- and then the next day, she stopped coming over to the Sanctum."
Stephen didn't know what to say to that. "And were we... Together?"
"As far as I know?" She sighed. "No."
He woke up in a cell and the first thing he did was look for America. She seemed unharmed, but keeping a kid locked up like this? He turned to the two lab doctors, intending to give them a piece of his mind, except-
The woman turned around to glance at him, raising her eyebrows in an achingly familiar way.
"Toni." Funny how it didn't hurt to say her name when she was standing right there in front of him.
"So there's a variant of me in your world," she mused. "Interesting. We had our suspicions but we weren't sure."
Stephen felt jittery, trying desperately to catalogue all the differences. Her hair was longer, thicker, left loose down her back. She had the faintest English accent. And her nametag read 'Dr Jarvis'.
"Who are- why are you here?" He asked. "What are you doing here?"
"I am going to be running a few tests on you and your friend here," she said, eyes back on her tablet. "Painless and unintrusive, don't worry."
"Tests for what?" He demanded, glad he at least seemed to have his reactions under control.
Toni shrugged. "Any anomalies in your biological make-up, latent diseases we might not have cures for- who knows what we'll find."
"That's... Not your field." Even as he said it, he realized how stupid it was because:
a) Toni was a genius, duh?
And b) she might have gone a different route than mechanics in this universe.
Sure enough, Toni rolled her eyes at him. "It is, actually. Biochemical engineering." There was a short pause, in which she seemed to war with herself. "What was it in your world?"
"Mechanics," he replied. "What about... Iron Queen?"
She frowned. "Uh, no? There's an Iron Man who recently showed up, his name's Victor Von Doom..."
Stephen couldn't help a snort, then felt a jump in his heart when Toni smirked. "Yeah, the name gets me every time."
"And what about..." Don't do it, don't do it, don't do it- "What were we?"
She frowned. "What?"
"You and me." He couldn't look away from her. "What were we?"
Something in her face shuttered, eyes going carefully blank as she turned away from him. "None of your business, Strange."
This Toni was not nearly as good at hiding her feelings as Stephen's own had been. But still, the hardness of her voice hurt.
"It broke her heart, you know," Xavier told him when the others had left to fight off Wanda. "When you started pulling away from her, starting relying on the Darkhold more and more- you never said anything to her either, but she could tell something was wrong. And then when you died..."
His mouth tasted like ash and he almost wished the Other Other Strange was still alive just so Stephen could kill him for causing Toni pain like that.
"Toni Stark," Strange murmured, fingertips pressed to the glass pane he was staring out of. "Is she from your world?"
Stephen shook his head, trying to discreetly look around for the Darkhold. "No. Different one, but she accidentally got sucked into the portal with me."
"Hmmm." It seemed to take effort for Strange to look back at him and there was bitterness etched all over his features. "I'd almost forgotten what she looked like. Maybe I'm imagining the differences."
"You probably aren't," he assured. "She was slightly different in my world too."
"Was?"
Stephen looked away this time.
"She died in your world." It wasn't a question.
"There was no other way." Even as he said it, the words felt like poison dripping down his throat. It hadn't yet been so long for him that his eidetic memory couldn't perfectly recall the look of betrayal on her face as he'd dissolved into dust. Or the way his heart had collapsed on itself when he came back and realized that something had gone wrong in his absence and five years had passed instead of eight months. He couldn't forget the way her eyes had searched him out, staying fixed on him when the arc reactor's light flickered out.
There was no other way. He'd never told a bigger lie in his life. He'd picked the future where he might have a chance, but even that had gone wrong.
"Are you happy?"
Stephen started, glaring at his alternate self. "What kind of a question is that?"
"Christine Palmer asked me that at a wedding," Strange went on, like he hadn't heard. "At Toni's wedding, to Steve Rogers."
Stephen winced at the name.
"I told her 'of course, I am, how could I not be? After all, she's happy.' And then I came home and..." Strange chuckled darkly. "Then the Civil War happened. She died in Siberia. And I spent six months trying to work out whether she'd be alive if I'd just... Told her how I felt."
He stepped closer all of a sudden and Stephen's gaze dropped, finding a book bound tightly to the belt of Strange's tunic. The Darkhold.
"That's right," Strange whispered. "I used it. Tried to find a universe where I was happy, where she was alive, where we could be together-"
He looked manic, Stephen realized. Completely out of his mind with loss and grief. And power.
"-and you know what I learned?" He questioned. "It's that no matter what, we will always, always lose her. No. Matter. What." He smiled and, for a second, seemed almost normal. "Wouldn't that drive a man crazy?"
"I'm sorry," Stephen said quietly, but internally, he knew this was a lost cause. "But maybe there's a way to fix this. If you help me save my universe- it's what Toni would have wanted."
"Here's an offer," Strange said abruptly. "I gave you the Darkhold. And that Toni Stark waiting out there stays with me."
Stephen scoffed. "I doubt she'll agree to that."
"Thought so."
"What did happen to me in your world?" Toni asked.
Stephen couldn't meet her eyes. "I messed up." It was the most truthful thing he'd said about his own choices on that day. "And I lost you."
She tipped her head slightly as if to look at him better. He chanced a glance at her and found a soft smile on her lips, like she understood a little of what he wasn't saying.
"Seems like that's all I do in every universe," he said tightly. "Keep messing up. Keep losing you."
"Every universe seems a bit of a stretch. There might be some where we're happy," she suggested.
His own Toni had never been so optimistic. Stephen couldn't bring himself to dash this one's hopes. "Maybe," he agreed half-heartedly.
She raised her hand and Stephen closed his eyes, resisting the urge to kiss the skin of her palm- smooth and soft where he remembered tough callouses.
"You asked me what we were in my world," she recalled in a quiet voice.
"Yeah?" He looked at her again.
She held his gaze steadily. "I love you."
Stephen felt a sob get stuck in his chest and he beat it back down. "Present tense?"
Toni laughed- it sounded broken. "I'll always love you, Stephen."
He didn't think he deserved to say it back. He didn't get the chance either; a portal opened up, America and Wong standing in it. And Toni gave him a last smile before turning away.