Out of a vintage metal cigarette case box, decorated with floral motives and a single spot of rust around its hinges, Marion pulled out a thin cigarette and stuck it in between her lips.

"Have a lighter?" Her voice got a bit louder now that their environment changed to inside the walls of the notorious Hellfire Club, an all-mutant jewel of underground partying, dug under the street itself.

Stephen could feel the eyes staring him down the moment he had made the decision to follow Marion inside, so with the cloak of darkness, the enchantment of a commoner suit and tie dissipated to leave room for his usual Sorcerer attire.

Now, the glances remained, but far more discreet. If the mutants there were not aware of his past connection with Daisy Vince, then they simply feared his reputation, or at least what it was rumored the Eye of Agamotto could do.

Still, the air was clogged with minimal ventilation, with an usual amount of distinct presence of alcohol and what felt like the aftermath of too much sweat or a burnt person, with no in between. This wasn't the atmosphere the pretentious sorcerer was used to and certainly not the place he'd visit out of his own free will.

There were far too many people in there for his liking, clearly. The lights were dimmed to a harmful point at which he'd have to squint through their flashes and neons. And the music? Well, it forced the loud Magician to get even louder beside him.

What kept him there was not the fact that he hadn't figured out yet that the woman's errands were questionable, much like her words, but the pure adrenaline of pride: he had the gram of hope that this nightmare could end that very day if he played his cards well.

Of course, Stephen Strange still had very little clue of the cards Marion dealt him.

To add some heat onto the already drowsy atmosphere of the Hellfire club, sat on a tall chair at the bar beside this curious woman, culprit of his recent drama to handle, Stephen chose courtesy and snapped his fingers. He lifted that left hand up, big thumb holding a flame steady.

Holding her cigarette between her lips, the Magician leant closer, to get that tip over the flame and bring some smoke onto her vice. However, Stephen drew the flame back at the last second. He looked down at her and she looked up at him.

"Do you know how bad smoking is for your lungs?"

The Magician leant back, taking the unlit cigarette out of her mouth. It took her a moment before laughing, finally catching the irony. "You used to be a doctor," she called out the fact, half rolling her eyes. "Well, shit, forgot you lot are sensitive about that whole-"

When she wasn't looking, Stephen snapped his fingers again and the flame jumped from his finger to the tip of her cigarette, lighting it. Smoke raised.

Marion took a moment to properly lock eyes with him again. It was an understanding to assume that she was finding this game of control amusing, otherwise, she would have frowned at his insolence and answered it as anyone should: with distance.

But no, Marion grew past that a very long time ago. Now, she was the type to answer insolence with boldly covered disrespect. The game, she learnt, was no longer just for the men to play and she had perfected this frolic to work to her advantage.

Because she let his cheekiness go without any comment, Stephen was quick to make a few observations which all concluded with a clear fact: the Magician felt safe in the Hellfire Club. Consequently, she surely must be seeing him as a threat.

Stephen shook that thought away with a raise of his eyebrows and chin. "This is a mutant-only bar."

"Tell me something I don't know," she dared him, beginning to smoke slowly. Her next move in their game of disobedience came swiftly, as she blew a thick cloud of white smoke into his face, making Stephen close his eyes, wave his right hand in front of himself and continue with a painfully short inhale.

"Are you a mutant?"

"Is that the best you can do?"

"You told me you'd answer my questions."

"I thought your questions would be smart."

"So you are a mutant."

"Then what's my mutation?"

Finally, their fiery exchange paused and Stephen pondered. Marion just laughed and continued, breaking their pattern, "Being annoying is not a mutation, so it won't count. It's more like my talent, which is why I make a perfect entertainer."

"Seeing into people's pasts," Stephen took his guess with just about enough confidence to not make it a question.

Marion frowned. Her nose scrunched up as if the very sight of him disturbed her for a second. She was calculating her words, she was measuring her chances and planning her next move. Stephen could tell, by the gravity which lingered in the shadow of her brown eyes, heavily blinking. She hadn't slept and all of a sudden, he was very aware of just how tired she looked in the midst of all these flashing neon lights.

"What gave me away?" Marion finally asked.

Stephen thought, What a great liar she is.

"The names," his mouth spoke instead. Even if he didn't get a detail right, he dug up another. This woman was quite the pathological liar.

"The names," Marion laughed along, with a couple of nods. "Of course. I called Spider-Man by his real name, didn't I? Damn it, my stupid Peter Pan fan just couldn't miss the chance of using the opportunity..." Her sharp inhale decorated her pause, right before the cigarette drew back to her lips and she sucked in the degradation willingly. It was ash and smoke.

"But you didn't say his real name on the stage last night," Stephen pointed out.

"We both know how bad that turned out last time it happened in the Multiverse," Marion narrated, sleepiness giving her voice a certain lowness she wouldn't have dared used otherwise. The congeniality of the crowded bar radiated off of her in more ways than Stephen would have expected.

"You know about the Multiverse."

"Why do you almost sound surprised? Thought I was stupid?"

She may have spoken to him calmly, but Stephen knew when he threaded on dangerous grounds. He just didn't care much, "You did say you weren't a sorceress."

"I am not. I am the Magician."

"Right...," he chewed on that agreement and let the poison of it grow his whole expression into a distinctively bitter presence to be around. Like a masochist, Marion smiled at the sight of his walls and the thorns growing around their ancient allure.

"So how does the Magician know so much?"

"Why don't you come to my next show and try to find out on your own, Sherlock? Or should I call you Watson since you're only good at asking questions apparently?"

"There will be no next show, Magician."

"Is that a threat?" Marion beamed with happiness, but contrasting to her easy take on Dr. Strange's words, the music in the Hellfire Club stopped. Every single pair of eyes turned to look towards Marion and the intruder.

He took a brief look around and it wasn't hard to appreciate that he wasn't in over his head if one was to disconsider the weight of reputation. He could hold his own if this was to turn into a fight, but there would be casualties which would echo cracks into his relations within Charles' School. He couldn't risk that and something told Stephen that Marion knew.

"I don't know what game you are playing...," he told her in a raspy, proud decision, quite the opposite of what Wong advised him when he left the Sanctum to deal with this. Only, unlike before, Stephen hesitated into that realization. He was being rash, again. He was being careless when the whole world could be at stake.

Took lost in his own mind he forgot to see that the Magician watched this hesitation of his occur with a hint of disappointment. She wanted him to continue the threat, not hold back on her at the last moment. This job is sadder than I thought it would be, she caught herself thinking for a brief moment in which her eyes had shown a fragment of all they have seen, all which they would no longer cry for.

"I tell you what," Marion raised her hand up to her mouth and the cigarette was back between her lips. The music restarted at this suave, discreet cue she gave the rest of the club. The smoke she exhaled out of her mouth morphed in the air between her and Stephen and formed itself into a butterfly shaped condensed cloud, flying away into the room, to join the dancing mutants as they moved on the beats of the music.

Stephen followed that butterfly with his eyes in wonder. It looked like magic, but his spell reacted in no way to it. Peculiar, to say at least.

"Find out my name," Marion lowered her cigarette again. "When you do, we'll no longer be business partners. You already know where I live, so come find me once you do know my name, alright?"

"I do not know where you live!" Stephen immediately furrowed his eyebrows down at her and her casually exhausted gaze. Then, his eyes shifted towards her left hand, falling onto his right shoulder. This sudden contact felt off.

"Yeah, you do."

The Magician snapped her fingers right beside Stephen's right ear and he immediately fell asleep. His heavy head fell into her hand and she held him until gently guiding this limp body to lean against the bar. Only then did she sigh with relief. At last, the tension in her shoulders dismantled, taking along with itself her soul's hunger for a vice. The cigarette became worthless, so Marion descended her right hand down and the remaining bits of it turned gradually in sparkling pink dust until her whole palm grasped the surface of the bar.

"This went well," she concluded.

"This is going awful," Wong sighed, just a few hours into the afternoon. He hadn't even properly finished his Chinese takeout alongside Peter and Wendy, when an odd thud in their fourier pulled him away from the kitchen. Stephen had appeared in the middle of the entrance hall, right before the stairs, soundly asleep that even a few snores escaped his parted lips.

Wong guided his hand above Stephen's head for a while, before actually complaining out loud for the Sanctum's visitors to hear as well. His worry hardened the wrinkles beginning to show on his face, and whitened the tips of his beard's hairs.

"The Sorcerer Supreme returns in a hypnosis sleep," he narrated, rather for himself than for his watchers. He was ashamed, to say the least, that they were witnessing someone bettering their best of the best. "This is serious..." He dropped to sit on his heels, knelt beside Stephen and the stairs he propped him to lay on, hoping an uncomfortable position might break the sleep.

But that was not how hypnosis worked.

It was a nasty business for sorcerers to undo this trick, because though it didn't count as magic, hypnosis vibrated its mess with the very soul of its target. Without the trigger word or phrase, there was only one long ritual which undid the damage done by a good hypnosis and considering how the Magician got to Wendy and Peter and how he felt the same strength lingering in dust around Stephen's soul, Wong was certain that tiresome ritual was his only way.

In fact, kneeling there for a moment was him catching his breath for what was to come.

He dared close his eyes for a collected inhale, when Wendy appeared beside him too, pointing at Stephen's Eye of Agamotto. "What's that, Master Wong?"

With a grunt, he opened his eyes and followed her pointer. Underneath the golden decorations of the jewel holding the infinity stone, an unusual whiteness stood out. It was just then that Wong noticed the Eye was not properly closed.

Eyes wide again within a second, eyebrows raised and whole body about to go through the hells of the worst worry to ever exist, Wong rushed his hands in position and opened the Eye without wearing it. A thin rectangular card fell out and the shine of the Time Stone relaxed the sorcerer back to his seat on his heels.

"Thank all Heavens the Magician didn't take the stone..." With that pressure off his chest, he looked at his side, where Peter Parker picked up the white card, as he too was now crunched beside Dr. Strange.

"It says," he narrowed his eyes on the cursive text, "tell me something I don't know."

Stephen's eyes opened in an instant and his gasp raised him to sit up. Everyone leant back and he took in the dreadful sensation of waking up surrounded by people, in a place he did not remember getting to.

"Her hypnosis," Stephen exhaled with a distinct heaviness. His whole state was the dictionary definition of ragged, but he forced himself to blink himself awake and eventually, even continue his idea, a mere observation he caught when the Magician snapped her fingers, right before the lights went out for him. "...is done through smoke."

His gaze fell downwards, much like his head hanging heavy from a forced nap in the middle of the day. It was not the green hue which Stephen would have expected to blind him then. He gestured his hand over the Eye of Agamotto and the artifact closed back up.

"Why did you open it?" Stephen's glare directed at Wong.

"The Magician opened it first," Wong glared right back.

"That's impossible," he dismissed, almost amused by the very idea of it.

Peter raised the card and passed into Stephen's confused and scarred left hand. "She put that into your magic amulet, Doctor. I don't know, but it seems to me that the Magician is pretty good at impossible things so far."

"Did you manage to solve this? Will she take it back?" Wendy insisted with a desperate sort of shade hidden both in her voice and in her gulp, following her rushed inquiries.

Wong had only one look at Stephen's flat smile and knew he got nothing. There might have been a time when he looked at Strange and was certain instead that he was seeing exactly the potential the Ancient One described. He used to be able to get over his recklessness, even his pride. But the balance was starting to tilt the other side these days, the more time grained between them in history, the less Wong felt like it had been the right choice to give Stephen Strange the honor of the title of Sorcerer Supreme.

Stephen felt the underestimating glare like a burn across his whole soul.

"I have a lead." Blunt and mercilessly cold were his words in that moment of wounded pride. The Cloak of Levitation fluttered its wake, lifting its master off the ground and up a couple of stairs, from where he could look down at the others. "Send Wendy and Peter home."

The order was his reflected pain and unlike the Magician, Wong did not take it as a challenge, but rather as a continuation of his irrational behavior.

"We can't go home though!" Wendy argued, looking up at the sorcerer. 

Oh, she has met him, unofficially, watching him from afar in many universes and she had almost been too happy to accept the fact that this universe might have a Stephen who does not only see to himself. She was disappointed, perhaps even angered, but biting back on each of those things, Wendy looked up just with the worry of someone who did not want to lose her home again. She loved this universe, even if she's only been in it for a short time and she surely loved Peter...

"Reporters know where Wendy lives and they are already harassing the shit out of Aunt May's front porch," Peter fired back the comment at the sorcerer attempting to just fly away from them.

"Then you go home and Wendy stays here, I don't care." Stephen's dismissive comment was a loud exhortation to be left alone, something almost too painful for Wong to hear at that time. He let Stephen go, wordlessly stopping Peter from pursuing after the madman clearly with something on his mind.

"Wendy will be alright here," he informed the boy. "We have beds in the Sanctum and reporters don't dare come close to this place. In the meantime," Wong turned his fatherly gaze towards the lady, "how is the conversation going with Mr. Stark?"

"I'll have to let him know Dr. Strange is not doing any progress," Wendy sighed. "He said he won't fire me at least, and he did say his marketing team has some ideas to commercialize the Spider-Man bit..." After this conversation with the Sorcerer Supreme, bitterness altered her thoughts, making her just about self-aware enough to cross her arms at her chest and sigh. "It's alright though. I just can't be seen in public with Peter."

A dagger dug through her heart at the very mention of that. After all they've been through, from TVA to Agatha, to not live their best lives together, lives which they've been granted the chance to spend with each other out of the mercy of higher beings... It felt like cruel blasphemy.

But she had to consider... Things could have been worse than this.

Tears built up in her bright eyes. Peter loathed the sight of her tears, but apart from a grimace and a hug, there wasn't much he could do then.

"What if I call Daily Bugle? As Spider-Man I mean. A statement, that she's not my girlfriend.."

"Give it another day," Wong sighed out, through Peter's idea. "Give us another day." The Magician had invited Stephen months prior to the show, making it the Sanctum's problem.

author's note:    so, drop in your theories

is marion a mutant?
is she a sorceress?
how do you think she knows so much?