(A couple of tag scenes that got out of hand. Notes and disclaimer in chapter one.)

The first thing he notices when he wakes is his tongue, coated and numb and taking up too much space in his mouth. The second is his fractured left hand, shivering with random sparks as it begins to wake as well.

The third thing's the phone. In the silence of the Sanctum, he can hear it jangling insistently downstairs.

Stephen groans, thinks about ignoring it. A decision that seems made when the phone abruptly stops ringing. Satisfied, his eyelids flutter closed as he tries to return to sleep. But the pains in his hand are getting sharper, and he knows it's probably only going to get worse. He should really just get up now.

He shoves himself up onto his elbow, squinting at the clock through the congested beat in his head. He's not sure exactly what time it was when they got back, but he thinks he's only slept for a few hours. A light-headed nausea greets him when he finally manages to sit up. He swings his legs over the side of the bed, not sure when he last ate anything either. He's still wearing his boots.

Stephen drags his right hand down his face, sniffs and wipes the back of it under his nose. The edge of the bed and the floor below it are littered with wadded clumps of toilet paper, tissues he doesn't remember using. He brushes the ones on the comforter to the ground, half-heartedly kicks them into something like a pile. Pushing off of the mattress one-handed, he waves away the Cloak when it floats in and attempts to settle over his shoulders.

"Coming right back," he mutters, stumbling toward the bathroom. The Cloak hovers along behind anyway.

The sun's making an effort to come out today, peeking between the clouds to trickle a fragile light in through the windows. Bright enough that he can disregard the wall switch; he doesn't look at it or his reflection as he opens the medicine cabinet and grabs the bottle of oxycodone. Using his teeth, he pops open the easy-off cap. Shakes a few of the tablets out onto the counter, puts all but two of them back. He leaves the cap off this time, so that he doesn't have to bother with it later.

The pills irritate his sore throat, and the second one takes extra work to get down. He turns on the cold water, ducks his head to drink from the stream. After a second he submerges his face as well. He knows he needs more fluids, some food. But he's not willing to go all the way downstairs when his bed's so much closer; he decides it can wait until later. After all, sleep is important too.

He urinates, grabs another handful of toilet paper to use as tissues. Makes it all the way back to the bed before the phone rings again. It sounds shrill, even at this distance. Maybe because he's sure that whoever's at the other end is going to have something that they want him to do.

Probably important if they're calling again; too much of a coincidence to think this call and the last aren't related. He could unplug the phone. Tell them he's dying. Refer them to Wong or one of the other Masters for help. He can just imagine the expression – or lack thereof – on Wong's face if he tried that last one. Stephen heads for the door before he registers that he's going to, wondering if he might not spend a little too much time worrying about what Wong thinks.

He's flagging before he even reaches the top of the stairs, his body feeling bruised and lethargic. When a dramatic sneeze unbalances him two steps down the staircase, the Cloak swirls around him. It bends to swoop his legs out from under him, carries him down the steps like he's riding in a sedan chair. Stephen struggles at first, gives up quickly. He rests his head back against the Cloak's high collar and closes his eyes.

The damn phone's still ringing.

His eyelids feel glued together when he peels them apart, the sitting room fuzzy despite his attempts to blink it into focus. The walls still shifting despite the fact that he's sure he's no longer moving. When he tries to stand, he finds that the Cloak's new molded shape makes it impossible to get to his feet. "Let me down," he grumbles, making another wiggling effort to free himself.

The Cloak straightens, releasing him; Stephen slumps against the curve of the round table, reaching across his body for the receiver of the vintage phone. He's a little surprised that the caller hasn't given up yet. He'd been hoping that they would. "What?" he croaks when he gets the bulky thing up to his ear.

"I, uh… Strange?"

He doesn't think he's ever heard Rogers sound so uncertain. It'd be highly entertaining under other circumstances, but right now he just wants to end this conversation and go back to bed. "Obviously. Why? Were you hoping someone else would answer?"

"No. Of course not. It didn't sound like you, is all."

He's already tired of being upright, and how can his head feel so light when the rest of his body's so impossibly heavy? "Well it's me. Now that we've got that out of the way, I assume you called for a reason?"

"There's a hostile. Using some strange – that is, uh, odd – energy to create an army. Tony's on his way to investigate."

Stephen wedges the receiver between his ear and his shoulder, grabs the other half of the phone with his good hand and slides down the wall to sit on the floor. The cord's coils stretch as he sets the weighted base on the rug next to his hip. "So why do you need me?"

"S.H.I.E.L.D. wants him alive. And the preliminary data is suggesting this might be your kind of thing."

"My kind of thing," he echoes. There's an ominous prickling in his frontal sinuses. His broken hand barks as he uses it to cover the phone's mouthpiece; he holds the receiver away from his head and leans the other way to sneeze. He sniffles, tries to clear his throat before bringing the phone back to his ear. "Where?"

"Denmark," Rogers answers, before giving Stephen the name of a town that he's going to have a hell of a time locating on Google Maps. It's a lot easier if he can visualize the place he's opening a portal to; he's found that the street view from Google is usually a good place to start.

"You want to spell that?"

"Just come with us," the captain replies. "We're wheels-up in twenty."

New York to Denmark. That was what, seven or eight hours? "I'll meet you there," he tells Rogers. Maybe eight hours of sleep will be enough to shake this off. "Call me. When you –"

The coughing is as unexpected as it is inescapable; he tries to smother it in the crook of his elbow, pressing the receiver hard against his thigh in an attempt to muffle the harsh sound. When he gets it under control, his head's throbbing in time with his tonsils. It takes a few seconds more to calm his rapid breathing. "Call me when you land," he finally rasps into the phone.

"Look, I really think we could use you with us on this. But if you're not up to it…"

He doesn't need Rogers' pity, almost tells him so. Moreover, if his assistance will end this whatever it is quickly, will save lives, he doesn't see that much of a choice. There's a lot fewer Masters left after Kaecilius' run with his zealots. He's willing to bet he's the only one the Avengers have on speed dial. "I'm fine. I'll be there," Stephen replies, his voice hoarse and unfamiliar.

He hangs up on whatever Rogers says next.

Eight hours. He's got eight hours before anyone's going to bother him. The promise of sleep swells to push out all other thoughts, including any compelling reason why it shouldn't just start right now. Stephen eyes the hated settee, decides he's better off where he is. The rug's soft enough. Tipping sideways, he reorients himself to lie horizontally on the floor. He cradles his left hand protectively against his sternum, closes his eyes.

He's jarred by a gentle but insistent tugging at his shoulders; the Cloak apparently objects to his choice of sleeping arrangements. "S'fine for now," he mumbles, not opening his eyes. "Don't wanna climb all those stairs."

Suddenly he's weightless; his stomach flips and his eyes snap open. He's surrounded by the red of the Cloak, but he gets a blurry glimpse of the doorframe as they pass through it. "This works too," he shrugs. The cocoon of the Cloak rocks gently as they cross the foyer toward the staircase.

The portal hovers an inexplicable ten to twelve inches above the ground. Stephen really wishes he'd known that before he made his floundering, stumbled entrance into Denmark.

Luckily he finds himself some distance from the action, alone at the end of this winding cobblestone street but for the terrified faces he sees darting and vanishing from behind drawn curtains. He doubts he's inspiring a lot of confidence, appearing with his head held deliberately high only to almost fall flat on his face. He hopes they missed that part.

A cloud of dust and rubble billows up from around a bend, and Stephen starts to trudge that way. He doesn't feel better for any sleep he may have gotten; doesn't remember if he slept at all, the restless hours mostly lost. It's an alarming sensation for a man who remembers virtually everything. And far, far too reminiscent of those months following the accident.

He tries to push the memories away, a challenge made easier than usual by the foggy distance in his head. Unfortunate that it's also making it so much more difficult to focus. He needs to pull it together, needs to be sure that he's more of an asset than a liability. He's already here. The Avengers are here. He'll provide a little backup, be home and back in bed in no time. He can definitely do this.

The Cloak nudges him, and Stephen realizes he's stopped in the middle of the street. His eyes refocus on the dry gutter that rounds the opposite corner.

Christ.

The Cloak unilaterally decides to hurry things along, lifting his feet just off the stones in order to better sweep him forward. It seems a blink before they're rounding the distant curve. There's evidence of destruction everywhere, overturned cars and smashed buildings futile broken sentries bordering the torn-up street. He passes a sign post bent nearly in half, a metal arrow pointing up toward a smoky sky. When he follows its direction, there's a flash of the red and gold of Stark's metal suit before the billionaire dips back below the roof top line.

He spots Romanoff on the street first, a blur of black leather as she holds her own against three faceless silver creatures. Stephen wonders if it's the tentacles that supposedly make this his "kind of thing." The bolt of energy he sends that way knocks two of them down; Romanoff dispatches the third with a spinning kick that almost takes off the thing's head. Or at least what Stephen assumes is the head.

He steps around a crumpled trash can to close the space between them, the sounds of the battle oddly muffled. He's not sure if it's the dust or the congestion between his ears. Romanoff spares him only an arched eyebrow glance as she surveys the mangled street for the next threat.

"Laundry day?" she asks with a smirk.

He looks down to find not the expected blue tunic but the t-shirt and sweatpants he'd slept in. Worse still, his feet are bare. It's fundamentally jarring, and for a moment all he can do is blink down at himself. How could he possibly have left the Sanctum like this? How could he not have noticed that he's not wearing shoes? His brain does nothing but click and spin, refusing to offer up any explanations.

Romanoff swears, takes off running. Stephen's head comes up to see Rogers tumbling out from behind a pile of dirt and stone with two of the silver creatures clinging on tight. They're probably each five feet long, and Rogers is only visible in bits as he thrashes beneath them. His free hand scrabbles to dislodge the one that seems intent on wrapping itself around his face.

Romanoff joins the effort; Stephen conjures a sizzling whip to deal with the one pinning the captain's other arm. The magic cord makes quick work of it, hurling the thing through the cracked front window of what used to be a bakery. He doesn't actually hear the glass shatter, but he'd swear he sees a comical puff of what he imagines is powdered sugar waft out to dissipate into the haze outside. He turns back to the two Avengers in time to watch Romanoff crack the other featureless head into the ground for at least the second time. There's already a glossy shine of blue fluid leaking out to pool on the street beneath it.

Rogers is gasping but sitting up when Stephen gets there. The Widow offers him a hand when the doctor doesn't. "We got pushed back," he's saying as he gets to his feet, the slightly breathy explanation competing with a muted far-flung rumble of what's either thunder or that huge green monster they call the Hulk. "They're at the town center."

"Seems like that's probably where we should be then," Stephen quips irritably. He's surprised by how hot it is here. Sweat begins to gather under the hairs on his upper lip. "I suggest you lead the way."

They pick a path around chunks of metal and brick, the hum of Rogers' voice presumably an attempt to fill Stephen in on the situation. He knows he needs to be listening, but despite this certainty can't seem to think about anything besides the thick air or the distracting way his t-shirt sticks damply to his chest and back. There's also a considerable amount of focus being directed toward where he puts his bare feet. Something explodes on the next street over, and Rogers finally stops talking as they speed up their uneven pace.

"Aw, no fair. Nobody told me it was Casual Dress Day."

He'd sensed no warning of the archer's arrival behind them, but Stephen recognizes Barton's voice even before he turns. His eyes automatically flick over the surrounding area, pointlessly trying to determine where the man came from. Light glints off the one surviving window in a building across the street to bounce maliciously back at him, and he winces. "I knew that with my help this wouldn't take long," Stephen responds dryly.

"Whatever," Barton sneers. "How's your hand?"

The question triggers a staggering flare of pain in his left hand, the Cloak catching his weight as his knees start to fold. Sucking air through his teeth, he has no choice but to wait until it's faded to a more manageable throbbing. Through cracked eyelids he watches as a deep purple and black bruising spreads mottled over the back of his scarred knuckles; it feels somehow right there, familiar. As soon as he can move again he hides the incriminating thing in the Cloak.

"It's fine," he hisses. "Let's go."

The street seems to stretch on endlessly, a big claim for someone so well-versed in the definitions of forever. He's not entirely sure that that intersection's even getting any closer. Occasionally, he gets a glimpse of red and gold or green against the sky. His feet don't hurt at all, oddly enough, but the disturbingly pervasive weakness beginning to creep through the muscles of his arms and legs might eventually be cause for some concern.

"You waste time," Wong says from beside him. "Neglect your duties."

"What are you talk—" Rogers stops abruptly in front of Stephen, and the protest stutters when the Cloak yanks at his shoulders to keep him from plowing into the other man. "—talking about?" he finishes, creating a temporary shield to slow the new group oozing ominously up out of the rubble ahead. "You're saying that faceless space octopuses somehow don't fall into the sphere of my duties?"

Wong crosses his arms, glowering, but Stephen really feels like he's made his point. He swipes at his slick forehead with the back of his less-damaged right hand. It's so hot. He doesn't understand how everybody else can stand wearing those heavy jackets and gloves. Rogers must be hideously uncomfortable in those oversized furry earmuffs.

Wong gestures with his chin to something beyond Stephen's left shoulder. He turns to see one of the creatures in question leaping at him from out of nowhere.

Leaping? Certainly airborne. How do they even do —?

It tackles him; tentacles snake around his chest and ribs, start to squeeze. Amazingly it's left his arms free, but even when he realizes this he finds he can't make either extremity move. Nor his hands. And it's getting a little difficult to breathe. Stephen twists his neck, looking to Wong for help, but the other Master is simply gone. He writhes under the weight of the creature, desperately trying to make his fingers at least twitch.

Even in this perilous situation, the irony is not lost on him.

He searches his mind for a spell, any spell; the only thing he can dredge up is a short incantation intended to exude a sort of mystical slime from the conjurer's skin. He's never tried it, had come across it randomly one day in his reading and – despite the idea sounding both disgusting and hardly necessary – had been entertained enough by the novelty to commit it to memory along with the other two spells on the page. He's not at all excited to have finally found a use for it.

The tentacles tighten and his breath comes out in a wheeze. Stephen calls on his eidetic memory and visualizes the old book, the paper rough and yellowing. The ink of the swirling script faded long ago from black to brown. But when he turns his mind's eye to the words themselves, he finds them to be only meaningless symbols. No language he's ever seen before, and certainly nothing he's able to read. There's a bubbling panic building now. He's tumbling helplessly through the air, the seatbelt digging into his chest.

Then the weight is suddenly gone, though he discovers himself still unable to pull in a deep breath. Stephen blinks up at the silhouette figure of Rogers looming over him. With the sun behind him, those earmuffs give his head a decidedly alien shape.

Rogers extends a hand down to him, but Stephen finds he still can't move his arms. Before he can fully process this, the captain reaches down and hauls him up by the bicep. "You really are sort of useless, aren't you?" the man murmurs in his ear once they're nearer to level with one another. "Next time I won't bother to call."

Stephen jerks away, affronted, and is somehow at last able to raise his arms and make his recalcitrant fingers trace a helpful pattern. The resulting blast sends one of the approaching creatures flying into the side of a parked car. He'll show Rogers how useful he can be.

The battle rages on in a kind of repetitive loop; somewhere in his sweltering exhaustion it occurs to Stephen that they're not getting any nearer to the center of town. But there's nothing for it except to keep fighting. No shortage of the enemies pinning them in place. Arms ponderous and only minimally cooperative, leg muscles achy and cramping, he can concentrate on little more than remaining standing and not hitting any of his temporary teammates. Wiping away a trickle of sweat by his ear, he absently watches Romanoff wrangle one of the silver creatures to ground with her thick grey scarf.

And now he's scrambling up a dusty shifting pile close behind her, despite having no recollection of when it was that he'd started to move. It's more like a mountain, really, stretching up and out to completely block their view of the other side, and instinctively he knows that the only way around it is over. Too bad that peak looks so hopelessly far away. He's got an excellent angle on Romanoff's ass, though; he tries to focus on that bright spot rather than the muted screaming of his trembling limbs.

It isn't until he slips, sliding a breathless few feet before being able to stop his own momentum, that he realizes the Cloak is no longer with him.

Panting, fingers digging for any purchase they can find, Stephen tentatively lifts his head from the sharp debris it's resting on to look around for any sign of the relic. The ground is a distant blurry thing, the Cloak nowhere in sight. Seeing no other option, he returns to his climbing. Romanoff's way ahead of him now, almost at the top.

She waits for him there; he joins her at the peak. Stephen drags himself up the last few inches with wobbly, complaining arms, lifting himself just enough to peer over the edge. On the other side of their mountain, Dormammu's monstrous face swallows the entire sky.

He's standing, flailing, falling. Glass splintering into diamonds, the crunch of metal and bones. That inescapable high, mad ringing. He lands at the bottom disoriented, hyperventilating. His hands hysterically drawing symbols in the air, frantically seeking even the meagerest of protections. Christine crouches beside him, wraps her hands around his as if to still them.

He tries to pull away, a terrified animal keening percolating in his chest as Dormammu hovers grinning and motionless over her shoulder. Christine's wrapping the Cloak around his fingers, binding them. "I just want to help," she tells him.

Stephen struggles, maybe screams. All he can hear is her voice, that eternal crushing ringing. "Whatever you're seeing, it's not real," she says. Behind her, Dormammu's massive mouth simultaneously forms the words.

"It's too hot," he croaks, the last thing he'd wanted to say.

"It's not. It's snowing." She's a whisper that circles his head.

"Inside?" Why would he ask that? "We need to go…" There's nowhere to go.

Christine presses a pillow firmly but gently to his face. In his blindness, his suffocation, he feels her lips brush his earlobe with her exhale. "Stephen, listen to me: I promise you, none of this is real..."

He jerks out of the nightmare gasping, for a moment still blind and smothered. Now there's the faint smell of strawberries and sweat; he eventually convinces his eyes to open, but the room around him refuses to come more than half into focus. His nose feels gigantic, raw, and he's pretty sure there's some sort of invisible demon sitting directly on the center of his sternum.

"Stephen? Stephen, can you hear me?"

And his hands – oh christ, his hands. Alit from within by pure electrical fire, howling and straining and burning. He raises his head only far enough to squint down his body at them; they're moving of their own accord above his abdomen, jumping and twisting under the futile restraint of Christine's smaller fingers. It feels as if they've been doing that for a while.

"Stephen, I need you to stop. Are you listening?"

Her very careful calm pings in a tiny unclouded bit of his brain, and with a blink he finally understands why. Sparks and partially-formed symbols decorate the air around the bed. The nightstand and the old cedar wardrobe appear to be crookedly levitating.

The inside of his mouth is papery dry; the congestion in his nose and throat makes him feel like he's drowning. He pries his tongue from where it's stuck behind his teeth and tries to shape words for her, but his inhalation tickles his irritated tonsils and starts him coughing. There's nothing he can do but curl away from her and let the hacking spasms convulse his frame. Between the stabbing in his chest and the banging in his head, he distantly registers the uneven crash of furniture finding the ground. It's barely audible to his plugged ears under all the noise he's making.

The fit leaves him drained and shaking, and when Christine touches his back and tries to coax him into turning over, it's several long exhausted seconds before he can make his body comply. Stephen sniffles, rolls onto his spine. Even his eyes hurt. They certainly feel much better closed.

"Hey, just a few seconds and you can go back to sleep. Okay?"

It sounds like a question, like she's giving him a choice. He knows from experience that she's not. "Mmm…" he manages, a thick growly hum. His eyes roll uselessly when he's finally able to pull them open.

The lines of a water glass sharpen and soften in front of him. "First this."

There's no way the hands fluttering weakly against his abdomen are going to be capable of holding anything. He's not even sure he can raise his arms. Instead of explaining this to her, it seems much easier just to close his eyes.

"Nope," Christine chides, sliding an arm behind his shoulders to help him sit up a bit against the pile of pillows. Stephen grumbles, coughs. She holds the glass while he sips from it without him having to ask, and he realizes he shouldn't have expected otherwise. Unpleasant memories press at the edges of his hazy mind. "Do you know where you are?" she asks him.

This feels to Stephen like a fundamentally stupid question. "… course."

"Really? Because you haven't been too sure for the last few hours."

His brain grabs onto this, tries for a moment to examine it. But it's too much effort to hold onto all these slippery thoughts, and he lets this one go when it starts to wriggle away.

"Stephen?"

Prompting, like she wants something. He pulls himself from wherever he's been to look for her question. "Sanctum," he grunts. Rolling his head over the pillow, he follows the glass in her hand back to the nightstand and spots a box of tissues. His arm twitches in a feeble gesture.

She grabs a fistful, drops them onto his stomach. "I want to start an IV, try to get you rehydrated," she says, as he blows his nose loudly and repeatedly. "I would've done it sooner, but I was afraid you'd pull it out with all that thrashing around."

The tissue paper brushes annoyingly against his skin under his trembling hands, but he uses all of them. His arms fall, too weighted to hold up, and the back of his hand comes down on something. A cold pack no longer cold. The air sizzles and bends around him.

His eyelids sink again.

Waking implies having slept, or at least some measure of unawareness. Stephen doesn't know. In the stretchy seconds it takes for the room to sharpen around him, he isn't even entirely sure where he is. There's no panic in his muddled lethargy, only a curious confusion. He turns his heavy head, searching for the window and its expensive city view.

But it's not there and these furnishings are all wrong – wrong, Wong, Sanctum – and his head pounds with a rush of jumbled thoughts as he realizes where he is. He doesn't move for a moment, exhausted by this small victory. It's quiet. Or would be if not for the gurgling sounds he's making while trying to breathe.

He's alone, though he seems to recall Christine being here. Had that been a dream? Maybe, because there's also a picture in his mind of Rogers wearing fuzzy earmuffs that feels just as recent. But when he lifts an arm to rub at a bleary eye, he's stopped by a faint tug and finds a needle sticking out of the back of his right hand. He traces the plastic tubing up to an empty crinkled bag hanging from a metal IV pole. Not only had Christine been here, but it seems she'd thought of everything.

Probably because this is far from the first time that she's had to hook him up to an IV in his bedroom.

Shying away from the memories, he discovers that the influx of fluids has as usual left his bladder uncomfortably full. The last thing he wants to do is attempt to stand up, but there's really no other choice. His swollen left hand pulses an echo in his tonsils as he tries to manipulate his fingers into pulling out the needle. It's a clumsy effort, and there's blood on the sheets before he can manage to apply enough pressure with the heel of the broken hand.

Stephen scowls at the dark wet splatter. He'll get the stains out later. Without the use of the hands pressed trembling against one another, he wiggles into more of a sitting position. He'd love to rest here, take a second for the congestion in his head to resettle. But his bladder's becoming insistent.

Disentangling himself from the sheets and getting his feet on the floor feels another journey, another triumph, though any self-satisfaction is quickly erased when his initial try at standing immediately fails. He makes it to his feet on the second attempt; the air shimmies as he fights to draw sufficient breath through the tight bands around his chest.

His feet shuffle an autonomous path to the bathroom, his body stiff and hunched around his connected hands. Remembering something about floating furniture, he glances toward the wardrobe as he passes. There's a jagged crack across the front of the wood, undeniable evidence of its abrupt and awkward landing.

There's also a two foot gouge in the plaster of the ceiling. The edges look singed. He'll have to make sure nothing's been damaged upstairs.

Hours later he finally makes it to his destination, and after a bit of fumbling and pawing gets himself oriented to do what he needs to do. The sensation is bliss. Mission accomplished, his body suddenly decides that it's had enough of being vertical. One minute he's flushing the toilet; in the next he finds himself slumped on the tile, his back against the ceramic of the tub and a dizzy roaring in his ears.

Stephen coughs, moans. Wishes he could at least reach the roll of toilet paper from down here. Especially as it feels like it might be a while before he can coerce his body into getting back up. He idly wonders where Christine's gone, if she has plans to return. Then he starts wondering what day it is.

Still daytime, says the small window, or possibly daytime again. A messy sneeze rocks through him, followed by another that explodes behind his eyes, and he swiftly loses interest in anything other than how rotten he feels. One of Dormammu's more creative deaths had been to bury him under a huge pile of squirming rabbit-like creatures; ridiculous as it might seem now, he's yet to be able to look at a bunny since coming back to Earth without feeling threatened. This is somewhere between that and the wannabe god's many, many variations on drowning.

He doesn't know how long he sits there before Christine rushes through the open door looking as if she's lost something. "Had to piss," he explains gruffly to her wide eyes. "Now apparently I'm down here."

She visibly relaxes; this situation too is familiar. "Oh. Okay. How about a bath?"

"Maybe," Stephen shrugs. He pulls his legs to his chest to rest his forehead on bent knees, instantly raises his head again at the intolerable increase in sinus pressure. He sniffs, coughs. Christine moves around him to start filling the tub.

"How're you doing?" she asks, perching on the edge above him.

He hates this question, especially from her. "Nothing's levitating, is it?"

She ignores the tone, motions for him to lift his arms so she can get his shirt off. Helps him clamber slowly up to the edge of the tub to sit and remove the sweatpants. Resignation skitters like a chill over his bare skin. "What're you doing here anyway?" he growls, not looking at her.

"You're terrible at taking care of yourself when you don't feel well. After arguing with myself for a while, I grabbed some supplies and came back." Still holding onto him with one hand, she shuts off the water.

The antique bathtub is more difficult to step into than the one in his condo, and they have to modify their practiced routine a little for her to support him as he climbs unsteadily in. He's expecting the water to be either too hot or too cold, but he doesn't really feel it at all as his foot breaks the surface. "You came back to take care of me," he reiterates nasally.

She leans a hip against the counter, watching him. "The plan was more just to make sure you didn't need anything. Once I saw the state of you, I decided to stay a little longer."

"Mmm…" Stephen sinks into the tepid water, almost able to stretch out his long legs. It'd be easy to fall asleep like this, but an urgent thought occurs. "Wait, how… who let you in?" Had he left the place unwarded? Unforgivably sloppy, no matter what condition he might be in.

"You did," Christine says. All he can do is blink up at her, gaping a bit. Though that's due at least in part to his complete inability to breathe through his nose at the moment. "You were already pretty out of it, clearly febrile. Your magic cape had to help me get you upstairs."

"Cloak," he murmurs without thinking, his attention already drifting off. There's a fat drop suspended from the edge of the faucet, seconds from its inevitable plunge. When it falls he falls with it, and as they hit the water together there's the sudden glare of a crucial piece revealed as absent. Stephen pulls his eyes from the water, looks around the bathroom as if he may have somehow missed it. "Where… ?"

Christine glances toward the open door, shrugs. "In the other room, probably. It seems to be keeping its distance since you tried to throw it through the window. Why, am I supposed to be watching it?"

His hands jump on the porcelain where his forearms are resting. "I did what?"

"It was trying to… help me, I guess? I didn't really know if it would stop the spells, but after you almost set the ceiling on fire…" There's humor in the tone, but her exhale sounds a somewhat tremulous laugh. He wonders if that betraying warble is actually in her voice or in his head. "Anyway," she regroups, "it was wrapping itself around your hands when you just kinda flung it across the room. There's a crack in the window."

He's utterly dumbfounded. His relationship with the Cloak feels one of virtual unity, the relic seeming to often be able to read his very thoughts. Stephen can't imagine what could have so distracted it that he'd been able to take it by surprise.

"You were obviously delirious. It wasn't your fault."

Reclining back into the water again, he doesn't bother to correct her assumption. Though he should probably get up soon and go apologize. He wonders if the Cloak's wariness signifies scared or sulking.

Likely the latter.

"Are you okay in here for a bit?" Christine asks, stretching as she straightens. "I want to change the sheets on the bed."

He grunts an affirmative, and apparently she knows well enough by now not to expect anything more. Instead of watching her go, he lets his arms slide down the white ceramic to float just under the water by his thighs. Aimlessly he contemplates the juxtaposition of his hands.

The tiny ragged puncture on the right one had stopped bleeding, but there's a bright sting there now. A wisp of clouded water disperses effortlessly into the rest as the wound reopens a little. The left, by contrast, feels better than it has in a while. It may look a mangled mess in the distorting bathwater, but the temperate weightlessness eases some of the stress in the contracted muscles and tendons. He knows it's a respite unlikely to last for long, but in this context he'll take any win he can get.

Stephen tips back his head and closes his eyes, the miniscule tide lapping at the warm hypersensitive skin of an exposed bent knee, his toes. He thinks about the custom-built jacuzzi in his condo, for a moment can even feel the jets. He loved that jacuzzi. There's a trickle of water spilling over his shoulder to run down his arm, something soft and sodden sponging at his chest. When he wrestles his eyes open, Christine's kneeling beside the bathtub, her face only about six inches away.

Had he fallen asleep? His thoughts are sticky and his head too heavy to lift. She smiles at him, but all he can do is blink dumbly at her, vaguely tracking her motions. Finally he clears his throat, finds a gravelly imitation of his voice. "… be a lot more fun if you waited until I was awake…"

"Not supposed to be fun," she teases. "You stink."

"… f'you want to get me naked… just have to ask."

She gives him a look that goes with the gentle shove to his arm, returns to the sponge bath. "Please. A half an hour ago you thought you were in Denmark."

Rogers. He bolts upright, splashing them both as his arm surges up out of the water to grab for the edge of the tub. He's supposed to be in Denmark. Isn't he? Did that phone call actually happen? The bathwater is all waves now as he tries to get into a better position from which to stand. "How long… what time is it?" His eyes dart around the room as if he might make a clock suddenly appear where none had been before. Seems like something he should be able to do.

"Hey, where are you going?" She's startled, worried. Trying to cover it all with a practiced calm. Irregular patches of water darken the denim of her jeans.

Nowhere, apparently. He's stuck on his knees, weak and panting from the minor flurry of physical activity. His hand grips the rounded porcelain edge as the air rocks at the same speed as the water settling around him. "Time," he demands between sharp raspy breaths. "What. Time. Is. It."

"Relax. Where is it you think you need to go?" Mollification drips from her voice like water from his skin. He glares at both of her, drops his head when the diplopia starts making him nauseous.

"Avengers…" he mumbles, but now he's coughing again – christ, when is this going to be over? – and the shivery vertiginous instability that follows gives him no choice but to sink back onto his heels. He shifts onto a hip, pries his fingers loose from the ceramic to bend his arm into a pillow for his aching head. The side of the tub is solid and cool where his ribcage presses against it.

Fingertips touch his hair; the shape of a familiar hand rests lightly on his head for a moment, disappears. "If you mean Captain Rogers," she says, taking advantage of his new position by turning her attention to washing his back, "I talked to him."

Something like irritation fizzles out before he can identify it. Stephen's not about to try and lift his head, but he turns it enough to be able to squint at her with one eye. She's close, leaning over him, and all he can really see from this angle is the white cotton of her shirt where it covers her abdomen. "You talked to him."

"I did. And he actually remembered me from the benefit, which is sweet…"

"Spare me," Stephen groans. "M'already nauseous. What… uh, what…"

"Did I tell him?" she finishes, when his fickle focus is yanked away by fever and the exposed slice of skin where her shirt's riding up as she stretches. "That, as your doctor, it was my opinion that you weren't fit for duty. Nor would be in time to take part in the current mission."

Stephen groans again. He buries his head back in the crook of his elbow, hoping that this part is a dream too.

"Which he wouldn't tell me anything about, by the way. What's in Denmark?"

Dormammu's face appears out of the darkness behind his eyelids, and he moves to disguise his flinch. He sits up as slowly as possible, most of his weight still slumped against the side of the bathtub. Instead of warming with his body heat, the porcelain seems even colder than before. "Dunno. Didn't get to go."

Christine shifts back a little, smiling. Or at least that's the impression he gets from his brief glimpse of her face; it's too difficult to hold up his head, much easier to let his gaze fall where it will. The curve of her knees in their denim skin, that pale blue unnaturally bright against the blurry tile. "Don't say it like I wouldn't let you go on the school field trip," she scoffs.

"Never been to Denmark," he pouts, mostly just because he's feeling so unbearably cranky. But now he's thinking about octopus. Do they have octopus in Denmark? His eyes slide past his water-covered thighs to the broken hand that floats beside him. He tries to flex his fingers, doesn't get very far. "What'd he say?"

"That he hopes you'll feel better soon, that he'll be in touch. Why, what did you expect him to say?"

His hand's a balloon animal gone horribly wrong, swollen and grotesque. Time catches and slips, and he has to look at the other one to be certain he's not recovering from another surgery. Unless they'd decided to only do one at a time this round; they'd discussed it before. To give him more functionality, they'd said, more independence. As if this was actually his life. As if he was going to have to learn to live with limitation.

"Ready to go back to bed?" Christine asks. "Or do you want me to wash your hair?"

He'd forgotten she was here – had he known she was here? – and he looks that way. The puzzle pieces of his timeline shift around, click back into their proper place. But still he can't seem to do anything other than stare blankly at her. She'd asked him something. A rhetorical question? Probably not. But nothing of any urgency, surely.

Had she spoken at all? He can't remember. Doesn't even remember how long they've been sitting here.

Christine reaches for him, brushes a few strands of damp hair off his forehead. His eyes close when she presses the backs of her fingers against his cheek. The cold spot sings out of the flames dancing over the rest of his skin, and he moans softly when she takes it away.

"How's your hand?" she asks on the other side of his eyelids. "Looks like it hurts."

He slouches down as far as he's able so as to rest the side of his face on the ceramic edge. "Always hurts."

"I took a look earlier, while you were out of it. It's hard to tell with all the swelling, but it didn't feel like anything's displaced."

He could've told her that. He sucks in a breath to say this, and his lungs rebel. Moist air bounces back into his face from the porcelain as he coughs; his chest and throat burn. For once in a long while it feels like his hands are the least of his problems.

She runs her fingers through his hair, short nails lightly scratching his scalp. "I still want to get an x-ray."

The hand twitches on cue, zigzagging a crack of pain from his knuckles to his wrist. "Why bother?" His grainy whisper winds through the air between them; Stephen tries to clear his throat. "Fine. Later," he agrees, just to end the conversation. "Don't you have to work or something?"

"Apparently I'm taking another sick day."

Part of him wants to snap at her, insist that he's that he's not an invalid. A larger part wants her to never stop doing that with her fingers. "Hmm…"

He needs to get up, go find Rogers. No, the Cloak. Because… because, because…

Her fingers leave his hair, and he slits open an eye to see her getting to her feet. She grabs the towel hanging from its hook. "Come on. Out before you fall asleep."

Laboriously he unbends from his contorted angles, bones brittle and untrustworthy as he makes them take weight. Back to his knees, the sloshing bathwater creating a motion that's mimicked in his head. The deafening congestion in his left ear only adds to the imbalance, but he waves Christine off with a scowl when she moves in as if to assist. He climbs out of the tub by centimeters, trying to ignore her as she hovers on standby.

He manages it on his own, but chills and weakness rattle through him on the tails of a barking cough. Snatching the towel from her hand, he borrows the relative stability of the counter as he wraps the terrycloth around his waist. His hands are shaky, uncooperative. He swears as one bumps the other, setting off new pain in both.

"Oh," Christine abruptly remembers, while Stephen's busy struggling to manage the impossibility of both breathing and standing at the same time, "I also talked to… Master Wong?"

"Stop answering my phone," he grumbles, leaning more heavily against the counter. The air begins to thicken, pressing against his wet skin.

"What, you want me to just ignore it?" she asks, her voice slowed and warping.

"Yes." He has to push the syllable through his teeth.

"But what if it's impor— Stephen?"

He's closed his eyes, but he can't say when. Her concern flickers like a visible thing in his darkness, and he hums a flat note of response.

"What's going on? Do you want to sit?"

"Bed," he coughs, finally able to force his eyelids apart again. Their insides feel coated with sand, his eyes watering. Christine's close, at his shoulder. She looks up at him – weighing, worrying – as the wall behind her starts to ripple and flex.

Her fingers touch his elbow, tingling tendrils winding up his arm from the point of contact. "Good idea. Are you going to make it that far?"

Stephen growls at her, an occluded and annoyed sound, and steps out of the puddle he's still dripping into. But it does seem a fair question as he starts unsteadily for the door. The floor feels insubstantial and foreign under his bare feet, his knees like they could buckle at any moment. The bedroom is a riot of smeared shapes and colors, too bright even with his tunneling vision. He slogs through it, keeping his focus targeted unwaveringly on the bed.

Another jump rope skip in time, and now he's sprawled gasping and exhausted on the clean sheets. "Do you want clothes?" Christine asks, from somewhere far away.

"Mmph," is the only response he can muster. Even he's not sure if it's a yes or a no. The room tilts dizzyingly, and he presses his forehead deep into the yielding softness of the pillow.

"There's almost nothing in your kitchen. I might make a list, go out for a bit. Anything specific that you want?"

He only has one mumbled request. "… put me out of m'misery…"

"I was thinking more like soup," she replies, unfazed.

"Whatever." It's not as if he'll be able to taste anything with his sinuses blocked like this anyway. He just wants to sleep.

She says something about toast, acetaminophen. Or maybe that's just his own medical training murmuring its basic triage in his head. He gets one eye open, mostly freed from the pillowcase obstruction. There's no sign of Christine from this angle, but he thinks he sees a flash of red through the doorway in the hall. Real or imagined, it's gone in the space of a blink.

He needs to get up. Go find the Cloak.

Instead he burrows underneath the comforter to try and escape the chills, the stabbing light, and moans from the depths of his self-pity. This sets off a wet and protracted coughing fit that he has no hope of mitigating. He's already too warm under this blanket, but at least it's dark. Without the energy or motivation to move, he absently opens and closes his eyes in a lazy game of experimentation with the lack of surrounding light.

At some point his eyes must stay closed, because his next conscious awareness is of fresh air tickling his face and the paresthesia in his forearm below where the blanket has twisted around it. Ungluing his eyelids is a monumental task, but he manages. Licking dry lips, he stares stupidly at what seems to be a blurred Wong sitting in a chair not far from the bed.

Arms folded across his chest and eyes closed, wearing his headphones. Maybe a gentle bobbing of his head in time with whatever he's listening to, but Stephen wouldn't swear that that's not just an illusion caused by the way his own eyes feel like they're vibrating in their orbits. Right now he's not even entirely sure he's awake at all.

One eye opens, fixes on him. After a moment of study it flicks briefly to the right, returns. Another silent, cycloptic appraisal and Wong goes back to his music, both eyes again closed.

There's a swath of red hovering in his peripheral vision, down by the end of the bed, and Stephen doesn't have to lift his head to know what it is. If this is a fever dream, it's a rather pleasant one. Even if every inch of his body aches and he still can't breathe through his nose, even if it's ridiculous to think Wong would really be here like this. Even if it feels like the pressure in his head might actually kill him, and like no amount of squirming is going to free the foot tangled intractably in the blankets...

"Sleep," Wong says, without opening his eyes.

It's succinct, wise, persuasive. Stephen finally frees his trapped foot, rolls over. He wishes Christine was here. Despite what she might think, there are occasions when he listens to instruction without arguing about it first.

end.

Bunnies aren't just cute like everybody supposes

They've got those hoppy legs and twitchy little noses

And what's with all the carrots?

What do they need such good eyesight for anyway?

Bunnies! Bunnies, it must be bunnies!

- Anya, "Once More With Feeling," Buffy the Vampire Slayer

(Anybody still with me?)