Seeing Scarlet - Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

~V~

"Stephen?!" Kat burst through the already open portal, startling, to put it lightly, many hospital staff. She ignored this however, and ran right past them. "Stephen?!"

"Kat?"

"Stephen!" She screeched to a halt, her boots skidding on the polished hospital floor. "Oh, good you're alive!"

"Barely, but yeah - how did you find me?" He was sitting up on a hospital bed with the help of a woman, another doctor by the looks of it. 

"I tracked your spell."

"You can do that?"

"Yeah, I'll show you how sometime."

"Is this one of your fellow cult members?" the doctor with Stephen asked.

"It's not a cult."

Kat instantly recognized the woman as the one from Stephen's stories. "Dr. Christine Palmer - Stephen speaks of you often and fondly. You mean a great deal to him."

"Oh-" Christine seem surprised, but touched. 

"Ekaterina, Master of the Mystic Arts," Kat introduced herself. "You can call me Katerina, for short."

"Nice to meet you - I think..." Christine responded. 

"Stephen we must go, London has fallen."

Passing through the still-open portal and startling Christine, they met Mordo and the Ancient One on the upper floor of the New York Sanctum. 

"Strange!" cried Mordo. "You're okay."

"A relative term, but yeah, I'm okay." Then he heaved a sigh. "He's escaped."

"Kaecilius."

"Yeah - he can fold space and matter at will."

"He folds matter outside the Mirror Dimension, in the real world?" cried the Ancient One. 

"Uh huh."

"How many more?"

"Two - I stranded one in the desert."

"And the other?"

"His body's in the hall. Master Drumm is in the foyer."

"He's been taken back to Kamar-Taj," Mordo said gravely. 

"The London Sanctum has fallen - only New York and Hong Kong remain now to shield us from the Dark Dimension," the Ancient One explained. She turned to Stephen. "You defended the New York Sanctum from attack.  With its Master gone it will need another - Master  Strange."

"Congratulations - welcome to the club," Kat told him.

"No. No it is Doctor Strange. Not Master Strange, not Mister Strange, Doctor  Strange. When I became a doctor I swore an oath to do no harm, and I have just killed a man!"

"You think we haven't all done things that shake us to the very core?" Kat demanded.  "We do it for the greater good, not just for ourselves, but for everyone. Not just for the world, but for the universe. All of this is so much bigger than ourselves, Stephen."

"I'm not doing that again. I save lives, not take them."

"You became a doctor to save one life above all others: your own," the Ancient One responded. 

Stephen scoffed. "Still seeing through me are you?"

"I see what I've always seen: your over-inflated ego. You want to go back to the delusion that you can control anything, even death, which no one can control. Not even the great Doctor Stephen Strange."

"Not even Dormammu? He offers immortality."

 "It's our fear of death that gives Dormammu life, he feeds off it."

"Like you feed off him?" he shot back. "You talk to me about controlling death, well I've seen how you do it. I've seen the missing rituals from The Book of Cagliostro. And folding space and matter? You're not that surprised, are you. You know how it works."

"Measure your next words very carefully, Doctor," she cautioned.

"Because you might not like them?"

"Because you may not know of what you speak."

"What is he talking about?" Mordo questioned their teacher.

"I'm talking about her long life, the source of her immortality," Stephen jumped in to  answer. "She draws power from the Dark Dimension to stay alive."

"That's not true." Mordo was convinced. 

"I've seen the rituals, worked them out. I know how you do it."

But she ignored his words, focused more on the matter at hand. "Once they regroup, they'll be back. You'll need reinforcements." With those words, with that, she left them.

"She is not who you think she is," Stephen told Kat and Mordo when she had barely gone. 

"You don't have the right to say that," Mordo told him.  "Any right! You've no idea the responsibility that rest upon her shoulders."

"No, and I don't want to know."

"You're a coward."

"Because I'm not a killer?"

"These forces will snuff us all out and  you can't muster the strength to snuff them first?"

"What do you think I JUST DID?!" They were shouting now. 

"You saved your own life! And then whined about it like a wounded dog."

"Oh, and you would have done it so easily?"

"You have no idea the things I've done. No idea. And the answer is yes - without hesitation."

"Even if there's another way?"

"There is no other way." 

"You lack imagination.''

"No Stephen, you lack a spine."

"Hey!" Kat broke into their heated argument.  "They're back!"

The three Masters charged into the entryway of the Sanctum where Kaecilius and his followers were about to perform their ritual once more. 

Stephen stopped them by casting a spell of his own. "The Mirror Dimension" he announced as the spell engulfed them. "You can't affect the real world in here - who's laughing now, asshole?"

But Kaecilius smirked.  "I am."

(Less than a month till Multiverse of Madness! :D It's almost here! 

I've started watching Moon Knight and writing a story for it with Steven Grant, so there's lots of Stephens  ;)

Thank you so much for reading and I hope you enjoyed! :))