2

When Strange woke up, he was in a hospital bed. Christine was by his side. “Hey,” she said softly. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.” He had no idea what day it was, or how long he had been out.

His eyes started to focus. The left was swollen mostly shut. He looked at her, then down the bed. For a long moment all he could do was stare. Both of his hands were in traction, with a frame of pins and brackets screwed into them. Fixators, they were called. Doctors only used them in cases of catastrophic damage. Strange tried to move his fingers and couldn’t. All he could do was twitch his thumbs a little. “What did they do?” he croaked slowly and painfully. Already he was thinking like a surgeon, thinking about what he would have done.

“They rushed you in a chopper. But it took a little while to find you. Golden hours for nerve damage went by while you were in the car.”

“What did they do?” he asked again. He didn’t care about the golden hours or the helicopter. He cared about his hands. Without them...he wasn’t sure what he was. He was nothing.

“Stainless steel pins in the bones,” she said. “There were multiple torn ligaments. Severe nerve damage in both hands. You were on the table for eleven hours.”

“Look at these fixators,” Strange moaned.

“No one could have done better,” Christine said.

He knew she meant it, but he turned his head to look at her and said, “I could have done better.”

It was an agonizing two weeks before they removed the fixators and let him try moving his hands on his own. He held them up, crooked and scarred and shaking. “No,” he said. He couldn’t believe this was happening. “No.”

“Give your body time to heal,” Doctor Patel said.

He looked at her and thought, No, this won’t heal. “You ruined me,” he said.

He found himself in the uncomfortable position of being a patient. He had consulted with every doctor working in experimental neurosurgery, and of course had his own ideas, too. If he could increase blood flow to the hands, maybe...

“Doctor Strange,” the consulting physician objected, “those tissues are still healing.”

“So speed it up. Pass the stent down the brachial artery under the radial artery.” He’d read about this. Even if he couldn’t perform surgery, he could keep up on the medical journals.

“It’s possible,” another of the consulting team said. “Experimental and expensive, but possible.”

That was fine with Strange. “All I need is possible,” he said.

After the second operation came grueling hours of physical therapy. He had to recover strength in his hands before he had any hope of being steady enough to perform surgery again. The therapist put rubber bands around his fingertips and had him flex his fingers straight. “Up, up,” he encouraged. “Show me your strength.”

“Ahhh!” It hurt too much. “It’s useless.”

“It’s not useless, man, you can do this.” The therapist was always an optimist, and Strange was sure that was helpful to some patients. Today it made Strange furious.

“Then answer me this, Bachelor’s Degree,” he snapped. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking. “Have you ever known anyone with nerve damage this severe to do this, and actually recover?”

“One guy, yeah,” the therapist said without missing a beat. “Factory accident, broke his back. Paralyzed. His legs wasted away. He had pain in his shoulder from the wheelchair. He came in three times a week. But one day he stopped coming. I thought he was dead. A few years later, he walked past me on the street.”

“Walked?”

“Yeah, he walked.”

Strange knew better. That was impossible. “Show me his file.”

“It can take me a while to pull the files from the archive,” the therapist said. Then his good nature slipped a little. Strange had pushed him too far. “But if it proves you wrong, it’s worth it.”

Strange threw himself into the work of getting his hands back. He read everything there was to read, no matter how experimental or how dangerous. He worked constantly at getting his coordination back. But at the end of a month, he still couldn’t shave his own face. He could barely write his name. His last hope was a European doctor named Doctor Etienne, who specialized in cutting-edge reconstruction. But Etienne wasn’t the answer. “I looked at all your research,” he said on a video call. “I read all the papers you’ve sent, but...none will work. I...I don’t think you realize how severe the damage is. At best, I’d try and fail.”

“Look, I understand. Here’s the thing—” Strange began. He didn’t care if it failed. He wouldn’t be any worse off than he already was.

“What you want from me is impossible, Stephen. I’ve got my own reputation to consider,” the doctor on the other end of the call interrupted.

“Etienne, wait,” Strange said. But he knew what it was like to refuse a case because he didn’t want to endanger his own reputation. Now he was on the other end.

“I can’t help you,” Etienne said, and hung up.

For a moment, Strange sat quietly. Then, in a rage, he flung everything off his desk.

There had to be something, someone...someone had to know how to repair his hands. Without them he wasn’t Stephen Strange.

Christine walked into Strange’s loft with a care package, only to find him sitting there dejectedly. “He won’t do it,” she guessed.

“He’s a hack,” Strange said, already on to the next idea. “There’s a new procedure in Tokyo. They culture donor stem cells and then harvest them and 3D-print a scaffold. If I could get a loan together, just a small loan, two hundred thousand—”

She cut him off. “Stephen. You’ve always spent money as fast as you could make it, but now you’re spending money you don’t even have. Maybe...it’s time to consider stopping.”

“No.” That was unthinkable. “Now is exactly the time not to stop. Because, you see, I’m not getting any better!”

“But this isn’t medicine anymore. This is mania. Some things just can’t be fixed.”

Strange knew this was true for other people. Not for him. If he wasn’t a surgeon—a great surgeon, the greatest—what was he? “Life without my work...”

“Is still life,” she said. “This isn’t the end. There are other things that can give your life meaning.”

He was not in the mood for her to get sentimental. “Like what? Like you?” he snapped.

That hurt her. She took a moment to compose herself and said, “This is the part where you apologize.”

Not a chance , he thought. “This is the part where you leave.”

“Fine,” she said. “I can’t watch you do this to yourself anymore.”

“Too difficult for you, is it?” She didn’t have the strength he had. He was going to see this through and find a solution, no matter what.

“Yes,” Christine said. “It is. And it breaks my heart to see you this way.”

“No. Don’t pity me.” That was the last thing he wanted or needed.

“I’m not pitying you,” she said. But he didn’t believe it.

“Oh yeah?” he shot back. “Then what are you doing here? Bringing cheese and wine as if we’re old friends going for a picnic? We are not friends, Christine. You just love a sob story, don’t you? Is that what I am to you now? Poor Stephen Strange, charity case. He finally needs me. Another dreg of humanity for you to work on. Fix him up and send him back into the world, heart is just humming...” He knew he was out of line but he didn’t care. He wasn’t going to be just a patient to her, or just someone who needed help. He was Stephen Strange. He didn’t need anyone’s help. “You care so much!” he shouted, bitter and sarcastic. “Don’t you?”

Christine had let him rant, and now that he had run out of steam, she might have gone on a rant of her own. But all she said was, “Good-bye, Stephen.” She dropped her keys on the table as she walked out.