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Chapter Text

The dawn sang in Stephen Strange’s ears when he was born. 

Its low, quick notes were his earliest memory, and its rhythmic occurrences marked his days clearly within the haze of infancy. His parents told him he used to reach small hands toward the window and gurgle musically. Stephen remembered that song, streaked like tally marks in an undefined youth. 

He remembered more clearly when he’d been old enough to walk. He remembered burying his hands in the rich soil of a newly ploughed field and singing. The dirt had rippled outward in a wave, concentric circles of runes carved into the field with Stephen in their epicenter. 

That was the first memory he had of his father’s voice. “God have mercy.” 

His parents didn’t tell him about that, but he knew they remembered. 

For a long time, Stephen didn’t understand what people meant when they told him to be quiet, when they talked about silence. He assumed they were speaking about their nightmares. Why would they tell such horrible stories of a world where the corn didn’t sing of its ripening harvest and the cars didn’t hum sandy rhythms on the roads and dawn didn’t harmonize with the passing clouds? How silly, that suggestion. The music was there, as Stephen was. Would never go away.

So Stephen wasn’t quiet; there was no such thing. Stephen laughed and ran with the music of the world, and it was only when Donna was old enough to play with Stephen in the barn that he realized the horrible words were not stories at all.

“How can you not hear it?” Stephen asked, his eyes wide.

Donna’s smile dimpled chubby toddler cheeks. “Just don’t,” she said. “Like you just do.”

Stephen wrinkled his nose. “Maybe you’re just weird,” he huffed. “You’re deaf and weird.” 

“Dad, Stephy’s being mean!” 

Stephen had a hard time listening when he was being scolded. He always had a hard time listening to people’s voices—the symphony of the world was so intoxicating that it took effort to pull his mind away and hear the things Donna said other people heard. 

But Donna was right. Stephen’s parents didn’t hear the music, and neither did little Victor, or the children at school. It shocked Stephen. The music only stopped in death, and even then, there was the quiet ring of decay and endings that sounded like empty space. Not hearing anything at all was… beyond death. Like it had never been alive at all. 

How could people bear it? Bear to live in this silent state of un-life?   

The first time Stephen demanded answers of a teacher, he was sent home for being disruptive. He was already problematic at school—they scolded him for being rude, for not paying attention, for taking four or five repetitions to hear what was said to him. Stephen yelled this furiously at his mother in a young, shrill voice, and she gathered him into her arms and shushed him. 

“It’s okay, little butterfly,” she whispered into his hair. His mother sounded cool and clean, like the packed dirt of a riverbed and the bits of quartz that shone beneath it. 

“‘M not afflicted,” Stephen said, squirming in her arms.

“No, you’re not. You’re a very special boy, Stephen. But you mustn't talk about the music to anyone, okay?” 

“Why not?” Stephen bit his bottom lip, feeling it tremble. 

“Because… because people who can’t hear it will see you… changing it, and they won’t understand. They’ll think it’s something bad.”

“But it isn’t! I can show them, I can—” 

“No, Stephen!” His mother’s voice climbed, and Stephen jerked in surprise. His mother grabbed his shoulders, looking into his eyes. “Listen to me. You are not allowed to use your music where people can see. Understand?”

Mutely, Stephen nodded. The weight of his mother’s anger sat heavy in his chest, and its intensity scared him. And if Stephen kept quiet about the song of the cows and the tune of the well behind the house from then on, it was because he didn’t want to make Beverly angry again.

It was years before he understood what she meant about other people. 

Stephen was walking to the bus stop, and there was a squirrel chittering in the tree beside the sidewalk. The creature sounded like bright sunlight and quick footsteps. A little like Donna, Stephen thought. Beneath its claws, the oak tree hummed with deep, rich notes, and the two songs harmonized perfectly. Stephen closed his eyes to hear it better.

He was so entranced by the noise that he didn’t check to see who was around. Stephen opened his mouth and sang ‘here’ into the tune. It was so easy to change notes, always had been. A quick thought to shift ‘dirty’ to ‘clean’, or ‘there’ to ‘ here’. The squirrel looked up at him from where it sat suddenly between his fingers and chittered. Stephen smiled. He ran a finger over its ears. 

Something screamed.

Stephen’s head jerked up, mind spinning as he thumped back into the real world. One of his classmates was staring at him, a boy with a song of bricks and slick puddles, and his eyes were wide with fear and suspicion. 

He spat something at Stephen, but Stephen didn’t catch the words. 

“What?” he said, taking a step back.

The boy spoke again, and again—but the squirrel and the tree and the brick-slick songs were so wonderful. Stephen couldn’t hear. He stared, uncomprehending. 

The boy’s face twisted. He knelt, grabbing a fistful of stones from the ground beside the sidewalk. They sang sharply, heavily, in Stephen’s mind. 

Then the boy hurled them at him, and Stephen started and sang ‘stop’. 

The stones obeyed. They hung in the air, unmoving, frozen in time. The brick-slick boy’s face went white, and he took a stumbling step back. Two. He screamed again, like he’d seen the devil, and fled to find help. To spread truth. 

Stephen let the stones fall to the ground with a hum. He was shaking. 

The next week, the Stranges moved to New York City. 

The city was loud. 

Stephen hadn’t known silence ever in his life, but he’d never known noise like this, either. A million songs from a million souls assaulted his ears. They layered on top of the deep, steady song of the buildings and the leaping, screeching notes of the cars and the trains. Stephen could only vaguely hear the sunrise, and even then it was only in the reflection of light of the windows. 

“I can’t live here,” Stephen said, his hands mashed over his ears as he looked up at the sea of apartments stacked on top of each other.

But he would. In this place of bright noise and brighter thoughts and clashing melodies, where the people were unmindful and without superstition, Stephen would live. He learned to stay quiet. It was easier to concentrate on people’s voices enough to hear them if he didn’t speak to interrupt them. Stephen threw himself into listening—and then, when he was old enough to be determined instead of afraid, he threw himself into questions. Surely there was a reason for this. Surely, Stephen could learn what it was. 

And if he learned everything else along the way, well. That was a bonus. 

When Stephen was nine, Donna bought him a watch. It was an analogue face set into a thick, silicon band that didn’t slip when Stephen picked it up. He blinked at the hands when he fastened it around his wrist. Curiously, he focused on its song. 

And every melody met in crescendo around him. 

There was a softness everywhere, singing beauty and order and answers all around Stephen. The music of his family, of every soul within the city, of every soul within the universe, fell into rhythm with it. Like this was the song they had been crafted from, minute instruments of a greater melody. It swept Stephen up. Cascading through every part of his mind, the music started soft and rose until it was a symphony of a current. Stephen didn’t fight it. 

Stephen. 

The resonate hum of the music wrapped Stephen within an embrace of right, of home. It was so beautiful. So very beautiful. Stephen reached for a reality he could hardly remember, wanting to share it. 

“Stephen!” 

A sharp voice pierced through the wonder of the song and sliced Stephen’s feet from beneath him. He collapsed into the strong arms of his father. Blinking open his eyes, he saw fear on Eugene’s face. Stephen didn’t understand. What was there to be afraid of?

“Dad,” Stephen said. “Uh, sorry. Must’ve zoned out for a minute.”

“A minute?” his father’s voice shook. “Stephen, you’ve been gone for hours.”

Stephen blinked. He looked around—the light was gone, and his family was crowded close around him. Donna’s face was red and puffy, like she’d been crying quietly for a long time. Victor clutched tightly to their mother’s hand, nervous when he met Stephen’s eyes.

“Oh,” Stephen said, the music in his mind louder than his voice. He harmonized with it unconsciously. He stopped when he saw Beverly flinch and Eugene cringe. 

“Sorry,” he said again. 

He didn’t listen to the watch’s song again, after that. At least, never as deeply, and never where his family could hear. But it was impossible to ignore completely. After that day, he heard stitches of the same melody beneath everything. It was stronger beneath the smoke and silver tune of clocks, and the cold and delicate song of screens. Stephen heard it in the changing of seasons. He heard it in the sunrise. 

And if Stephen could hear his own song, he would have heard it in himself. 

A year later, he was brave enough to reach out to the watch’s song. Ensconced safely within the trees of Central Park, Stephen broke a stick in half between his hands. He wasn’t listening to the crack it made—no, he heard its solid tune and knew immediately which tree it had fallen from. 

Alone, Stephen carefully hummed a note of the watch melody. It rang pleasantly in his head. Stephen hummed again. He opened his mouth and whistled. Of course, he wasn’t even close to recreating the swooping and magical tapestry of sounds. This was as much as he could do, however, when he could only sing one note at a time. 

And it was enough. The watch song wound around Stephen, played with him, and Stephen let it. Slowly, his apprehension of it drained away. 

So Stephen changed a note. He reached out and plucked a string of the universe, as he had done when he was a child to change a motion to ‘stop’, to exchange ‘here’ with ‘there’. It was harder to change more than one note; the more layers of melody Stephen tried to interlace, the more effort and concentration it took. Green leaves could become brown if Stephen combined the sound of ‘trees’ with the sound of ‘brown’, skillfully combining the songs. He knew what ‘dark’ sounded like—with practice, he could make it sound light instead, and voila, Donna, of course I don’t need a flashlight.

But this was different. Stephen didn’t know what the watch song was, what its notes corresponded to. He closed his eyes and listened, allowing it to pluck at him. He plucked back. Rewrote the music, and heard its resulting ripples with delight.

When Stephen opened his eyes, the branch was whole in his hand. As if it had never been broken. 

Stephen didn’t sing the timesong again. 

But he didn’t take the watch off, either. 

Central Park was one of Stephen’s favorite places. It’s song was peaceful, as uninterrupted as one could get in the city. He often took his books to one of the picnic tables to watch the bicyclists and puzzle out the secrets of the universe. 

And it was in the park that Stephen first met the boy. 

It wasn’t a coincidence that the place where Stephen had sung the watch’s melody was the place where he tripped over the boy with the clever eyes. Stephen had been walking the round trail when he’d heard it—a gorgeous song hidden within the hum of the trees. It sounded like a soaring eagle, the melody of flight layered atop a ticking: like machine parts and rust. The notes combined as clear and right as sunrise. 

Stephen had never heard anything like it. He stopped in his tracks, body swaying in the direction of the noise. He stole a glance at his parents and siblings in front of him. They were laughing, thoroughly distracted, and Stephen hadn’t been listening to their physical voices in a long while. He knew he shouldn’t sneak off. But Stephen’s curiosity had him ducking into the woods all the same, the steady natural melody closing around him. 

It was easy to follow the new song. Stephen wove between rocks and between well-groomed trees until he saw the small figure bent over handfuls of sticks and pebbles. Stephen paused between the trees behind the other boy, cocking his head. The boy looked perfectly normal. A little older than Stephen, maybe, with a mop of curly brown hair and a tick to his fingers that stilled when Stephen stopped behind him. 

Stephen took a step forward, tripped, and went sprawling. Because of course he did. It was fitting—the only way he could introduce himself to this specific soul. 

He sat up, cheeks burning, rubbing the knee he’d skinned when he fell. The flight and sunrise boy was laughing at him. 

“You surprised me,” Stephen grumbled.  

“No I didn’t,” said the boy. “You were watching from those trees.”

Stephen stared. His hands had frozen on his knee. The boy’s voice was clear—like the music was parting to let it through. Stephen didn’t have to concentrate at all. His embarrassment forgotten completely, Stephen clambered forward, suddenly wanting nothing more than to hear that voice again. 

“What are you doing?” Stephen asked.

The boy crossed his arms haughtily. “None of your business.” 

Stephen glared. The boy glared back. The ground around his knees was littered with twigs and rocks, and when Stephen looked closer, he realized they’d been carefully stacked and assembled. A little city, spreading cleanly at the boy’s feet. 

Stephen resisted the urge to sing the stones and wood into a more stable position. Instead, he wrapped his arms around his knees and cocked his head at the boy, trying not to get distracted by his music. The kid raised an eyebrow at him. Stephen tried to mimic him and failed. 

A bit of a smile cracked across the boy’s face. “What are you doing here?” he said. 

Stephen heard him the first time. “Just walking,” he huffed. “It’s a public park, you know.”

“You’re supposed to stay on the paths.”

“So are you.”

The boy smirked. “I can do whatever I want.”

It was really quite annoying that his song was beautiful enough for Stephen to fully believe that. Still, Stephen mimicked the boy’s turned-up nose. 

The boy looked angered by that. “What do you know?” he huffed. “You’re like five.”

“I’m nine.”

The boy stuck out his tongue at Stephen. “And I’m twelve. So you have to do what I say.”

Stephen squinted. He was skeptical, but the music seemed to agree with the boy. There was something he was supposed to do… wasn’t there? 

“Go away,” huffed the boy.

The trees purred their soft carbon song, and the dampness of the grass sounded like falling rain. Far away, Stephen could just barely hear Donna and Victor. The city spun in a rumble beneath them. Stephen’s watch hummed a constant, beautiful melody, always there and always echoing—and the boy’s voice carved right through it. 

Go away.  

Stephen stood, inclined his head, and left. 

It would be a long time before he saw the boy again, but when he heard engines or the sound of birds flying, Stephen remembered his song. 

Stephen and Victor shared a room in their tucked-away apartment until Stephen was old enough not to have a room in that apartment at all. 

They were the boys, and Victor took up space without being cluttered while Stephen hardly took up any, so it was a logical pairing. Neither of them minded. They scuffled and complained and drew lines in elaborate borders throughout the room of course, but it wasn’t spiteful or vindictive. At worst, they were petty, arguing and pranking each other. 

And at best, they would lie awake together in the middle of the night, parallel boys on parallel beds. They would speak. They would stay silent. And the nightmare tears would give way to laughter, to sleep once again, for whatever brother they were being hidden from. 

“What did you dream about?” Victor asked. His voice was quiet and high and fuzzy with sleep. Stephen hadn’t realized he’d woken him. 

Stephen dreamed with force enough to shake his brother awake, every time. Each time, Victor reached out curiously. So Stephen spoke of each vision with exhausted honesty, too tired to hide the truth of things like he did for his parents who looked fearful at the mention of the music. 

He had dreams in bright colors and bright sounds, and others that were blackened and hollow. Stephen dreamed of strange creatures reaching out to scoop him into their palms. They watched him with eyes the color of the cosmos. 

There would be quick dreams and long dreams, happy dreams and sad ones. Most often, they were simply peaceful. Neutral. Stephen floated in observance over the gears turning beneath a volcano. He watched a shaking hand lift a heart-shaped herb from a nest of leaves, a cat’s footprints trailing behind him. He saw a lasso around a frozen star. He dreamed of flying armor, of a city made of gold, of dinosaurs. 

In the stranger dreams, he saw bizarre images of twisting creatures leaping from beneath cracked earth and snapping chunks out of his flesh, though they left him feeling neither pain nor fear. Bones, still wet from the flesh they should be within. An orange sky. A human fetus. The rotting exoskeleton of a beetle in the eyesocket of a man who grinned at Stephen from an otherwise human face. 

But they didn’t scare him. Not really. And besides, the dinosaurs were Victor’s favorites. 

Stephen didn’t like them any more than the others, but Victor’s enthusiasm made him try to remember them better when he woke up. He could cling better to the faces of creatures in his dreams because of it. He and Victor named the species they didn’t know, which was a great many of them. 

The only dreams Stephen didn’t speak of were the nightmares. 

In them, there was pain under his skin, pricking at his face. There was cold pressure around his wrists and pressing against his neck. There was a voice asking him the same question, over and over and over, a question Stephen could always hear, could always hear because there was nothing, nothing, else to hear.

In the nightmares, the music was gone. Stephen sang until his voice was gone, scraped his fingers against the unnamable surfaces around him until they were bloody, but the noises couldn’t pierce the silence in a way that mattered. Metal glowed emptily. Fire danced without lightsong, ice scattered across his eyelids without coldsong. Color and sight and touch and magic had no meaning. 

And Stephen knew he was dead, in the nightmares. 

No, he kept saying. No, no, no.

When he woke, he didn’t know what he’d been denying. He remembered neither the question he’d been asked nor his surroundings, but he remembered the silence. Like a warning. Like a story.

But it was only a dream. Stephen watched the vague green shadows on the hardwood ceiling and breathed. The world sang. In no world would it ever stop—he knew that.  

“What did you dream about?” Victor asked. 

“Nothing,” Stephen whispered, tears streaming down his face. 

“Oh.” There was a rustle as Victor turned over in his bed, the springs squeaking. “Want to talk about dinosaurs?”

Donna had made a new friend, and Stephen was glad for her. What he wasn’t so glad about was the escort their parents required for her to visit her friend—a role most often assigned to Stephen. When he was Donna’s age, he’d insisted he was old enough to travel on his own, but Donna had no issue with a twelve-year-old Stephen chaperoning her. 

They stood on the subway, hand in hand, as Stephen tried to listen to her questions over the banging cymbals of the underground network and the litany of tired soul songs of their fellow passengers. Donna pestered Stephen with those questions constantly. Her song played in his dreams afterwards, and Donna just laughed when he complained about it. 

“What does this sound like?” was Donna’s favorite question. This could be anything. The sound of the rain. A book. A plastic bumblebee. The broken pieces of a ceramic dish spread out around her like moon phases. A key. 

Stephen would answer in long rambles, spiderwebs of adjectives and nouns in attempts to describe the music. When those weren’t enough—which was often—Stephen would be silent for a long time. He’d listen, and think, and he would tell Donna a story. 

“What does my jacket sound like?” Donna asked, grinning cheekily up at Stephen from the side of the subway car. 

Stephen turned his hand over in hers, brushing his fingers over the hem of her coat. It was an old thing. Ratty. The buttons at the front were mismatched: the top one shaped like a plastic flower and the lower ones clear silver plastic. It was still soft on the inside, Stephen knew. That was why Donna liked it. 

“It sounds…” Stephen began. He licked his dry lips and Donna watched him with eager anticipation. Stephen concentrated, listened.

“Once, there was a little songbird egg that wouldn’t hatch,” he said finally. “Its mother fretted and worried but its father was certain and patient. The egg would hatch, the father bird knew, and indeed it did. And the bird that broke through the shell was the color of Little Red Ridinghood’s cloak and had an annoying little cackle that could be heard all through the forest.” 

“Hey!” Donna said, and Stephen grinned at her. 

“The little bird was fluffy and beady-eyed and its feathers stood on end. It only sang in the early mornings—and that little whistle is what your jacket sounds like.”

Donna swayed, looking pleased. “Wow,” she said. “You really hear that?” 

“Of course.”

“And what can you do with it?”

Stephen shrugged. “I could make your coat a different color, or mend the hole in the armpit. I could get your button stuck or make one go missing.”

I could make it brand new, Stephen thought but didn’t say. I could unravel it until it was decayed and dusting. 

“Weird,” Donna said, wrinkling her nose. 

“Strange,” Stephen corrected and grinned.

Donna slapped him, and the questions continued as they always did. The subway stopped and started and stopped again, and Stephen and Donna wandered onto street level. Clammy sunlight slicked the backs of their necks. Donna lead Stephen through the tree-lined streets with purposeful intent, not letting him dawdle. Not even when a soothing melody broke through the bustling music of the street and stopped him between one step and the next.

Stephen cocked his head, eyes drawn to a building tucked away on the street. It had old brick walls and a greenish roof, and there was a round window set far above him at an angle Stephen couldn’t quite see through. There was a lilt to its song that set it apart from the buildings around it. A low and fluttering melody, drawn out.

And a woman stood on its steps.

She wasn’t looking at Stephen as she pulled a yellow hood over her head and reached out to the door of the calm building. If Stephen concentrated, he could pick out her song. It was like a tree, like a star. Old, burning, indomitable. 

“Come on, Stephen,” Donna said insistently, tugging at Stephen’s hand. He turned away from the building. 

“Coming, coming.” Stephen broke into a trot to match his sister’s pace. 

He only looked back at the calm building and the circle of stars woman once—and by then, they were gone. 

Donna lead Stephen into the foyer of an apartment building, festooned in enough expensive new Starktech to give Stephen pause. But Donna pulled him along, not letting him stop to crane his head to look up and up and up toward the roof that seemed to fall in on them. She let out a squeal of excitement as another girl leapt up from a waiting chair. They hugged tightly, already breaking into chatter. Stephen smiled to himself. Job well done. 

The other girl’s mother stood slightly to the side of them, a pleased look on her face. She looked up at Stephen with a nod. Stephen gave a little bow in return. 

“You’re Donna’s brother?” the woman asked. She offered her hand to shake.

Stephen took it, about to answer, but the words dried in his mouth. His hand froze around the woman’s, his eyes glinting wide. 

“You’re sick,” he said, the words surprising him. 

The woman pulled her hand out of his, but it didn’t silence her song. Stephen realized too late he’d said something wrong. He took a step back. The memory of the last time he’d done so twisted in his chest, and Stephen cringed at the woman’s quick movement. 

She seemed to notice. The shock in her eyes fell behind a carefully controlled expression of reassurance, as mothers seemed so adept at doing. She smiled at Stephen.

“I’m alright,” she said. “I’ve just been headache lately. I’m going to the doctor later this week.”

Stephen shook his head. He knew he shouldn’t—knew he should walk away with his secret and leave his sister to have a good time, but the touch to this woman’s song was deep. Stephen didn’t like it. 

“No,” he said. “No, you need to go now.”

The woman frowned again. “What?”

“There’s something—” Stephen broke himself off. “Nevermind, just, can I—”

He reached out, grabbing the woman’s wrist. Confused, she didn’t shake him off. Stephen listened. The music, a brush of wildflowers and wildfires, reeled him in and swirled around a dissonant cord of ‘sick’.

Stephen hummed, low in the back of his throat. He separated the music, a dark string of notes suspended from the silver edge of a scalpel. They hung in his mind like dewdrops on a spiderweb. 

The reverberations in his chest echoed up into his skull, and Stephen let them pool on his tongue as song. The note for ‘sick’, hidden in this woman’s music, snapped away under Stephen’s clumsy and inexperienced hands. He left in its place the bright note of health. 

Someone gasped, and Stephen opened his eyes. His vision was blurring, his head suddenly thick and smoky and exhausted, and his legs buckled as the woman yanked her hand out of his. Stephen’s knees struck the ground, and he couldn’t hear it over the music. He breathed. Blinked. Tried to focus on the towering shape above him.

The woman was speaking. The sharpness of words stemmed from surprise and maybe fear. The urgency in her voice was concern and maybe pain.

Stephen had just enough energy to know he’d gone too far and shown to much. But still, he smiled, listening to the changed song. It was stunning, despite the effort that it had taken. Clean and bright. Saturated and swinging. And it felt normal, in a way most of Stephen’s changes never did. 

He’d put something back. He’d righted something, not shifted it—returned something, not lost it. This song, the song of wellness and care, was a harmony to the life music. And it didn’t always take the pain and effort of changing the music with his power to heal . There were other ways.

Maybe the healing song wasn’t as rich as time’s. (Nothing could be, could ever be.) But this one was safer. 

And Stephen thought he could spend the rest of his life listening to it. 

“What was that?” came the woman’s voice, sharp and scared. 

Stephen stumbled to his feet and ran before the fear could turn to something else, something more dangerous. But he wasn’t fast enough. 

It was the second time in his life Stephen was called a demon.

Donna was never permitted to see her new friend again, and she only resented Stephen for it for a little while. 

She argued with Beverly and Eugene when she thought Stephen couldn’t hear. Her words, defending him, defending herself, met only twelve years of conviction. Twelve years of stubbornness built to cover a son’s unexplained sins and their own unanswered questions. 

“He didn’t do anything wrong!”

“But he is wrong. Something is wrong, and it’s going to get one of you hurt someday.”

Donna stomped away, angry and offended and protective, and Stephen felt nothing for himself. Sometimes, Donna asked him why not. He had no answer.

He was who he was. The words of a world he could hear so deeply did not anger him, no more than the dawn angered him. Sadness and acceptance were not mutually exclusive.

He did not like to see his sister angry. So Stephen, no longer thinking himself hidden by the symphony of the city, stopped singing. When the lonely music became too much, he would make himself scarce and hide within the layers of his own humming. And the next time he was at the library, he found a book on anatomy.

It was winter when Stephen first laid eyes upon a relic. 

(He didn’t know what it was, of course. He wouldn’t know its proper name for a great many years to come. But he knew it had a name, somewhere in the hooded swirls of the music around him, and it called him.)

Stephen pushed open the squeaky metal door with only a slight struggle against the wind. The cold, dirty sleet dripped down the back of his collar. It took conscious effort not to seize the notes and sing his clothes into warmth. But there were too many eyes on him; he could feel them. 

His breath fogged the glass in front of him as he slipped as quickly as possible into the antique shop. Dusty air, like the texture of old keys, coated the backs of his teeth. Stephen ran his tongue across them. His small hands twitched in his pockets, brushing against the wad of bills he’d managed to collect over the past few months. It was his father’s birthday. Stephen hadn’t had time to make a gift, so he came to the shop looking for one. 

Perhaps he sought a pocket knife or a pocket watch. Perhaps he was after an old beer mug or clockwork trinket. Stephen brushed his fingers over old buttons, across gilded picture frames, through the grooves of mismatched silverware. Dishes and furniture and books, dripping their rust and brass melodies like strands of paint. 

Stephen looked at them and listened. He paused at scintillating low tones, leaving his fingers atop those objects for a little longer. The songs that would harmonize with his father’s melody would lead him to a better gift than any practicality could dream to. 

He followed the curves of the shelves to the back of the store. A hollow in the wall, scooped from the skeleton of a staircase, contained even older objects. Even more beautiful sounds. Stephen knew, young and practiced in the art of exchanging allowance and change for sweets and toys and watches, that he hadn’t the money for them. But there was no harm in looking. No harm in listening. 

It was here that he heard the silence.

For a moment, Stephen choked on fear. Silence was unnatural, impossible—beyond dead and beyond evil. But he’d been mistaken. What he’d thought was an unnamable lack of the music was instead a song that had hidden itself. 

Hidden itself alongside Stephen. 

He couldn’t hear his song, so he could hardly hear this one. But no two melodies were the same, and so as Stephen concentrated, this new music took shape. It shifted as he moved. Reflecting things. Reflecting songs. 

Stephen reached out, his fingers landing on a thick brass chain. He traced the length of it, freeing a polyhedral cage of metal from behind a nearby photo frame. The cage hung between his fingers. It was strangely heavy and slitted like some sort of lantern, though the chain was more like something that might hang a chandelier. It hummed to Stephen. At him.

It knew, without a mind. Sang, without a consciousness to direct it. An object of the music. 

Stephen knew what it was. What it did. This was an instrument—an instrument to make songs alongside the universe, for those who could not hear the music. 

It could do anything for someone who could hear. Stephen could play anything he wanted with this instrument. He could weave magic aided by something forged for the song, designed within it. 

He let the object’s reflective song draw him close. Let it filter through his head. He twisted its song, changed it as he changed light to dark, and listened it run across the music of the shop. 

Stephen opened his mouth to sing. 

A hand fell on his shoulder. 

Stephen jumped, the chain falling between his fingers and clattering to the table below. He shook his head. His focus was scattered, his ears filled with music. A voice in the physical world, the real world, was speaking to him. Stephen couldn’t quite hear it. 

He took a deep breath and bit the inside of his cheek. Raising his eyes, he searched out the figure beside him. The vibrations of the stranger’s voice thrummed through his shoulder. 

There was a young man standing beside him—Asian, maybe six years older than Stephen. He had suspicious eyes and a stocky form, and he wore a strange robe of red and brown that somehow didn’t look at all out of place in this dusty corner. Gloves disappeared beneath the cuffs of his sleeves, and he was still speaking to Stephen.  

The man’s song reminded Stephen of book spines and candlelight and the hilt of a sword. Stephen couldn’t hear his voice. He focused on the man’s mouth instead, reading the words from its shape. 

“You are not careful,” the man said. “These things are costly, boy. And dangerous.”

Stephen, only slightly ruffled by the boy comment, jumped to the important question. “What is that?” 

The man regarded him. Stephen met his narrowed eyes with far too much confidence; his blood was still humming from his momentary dip into the music, and he wasn’t scared of this strange man and his even stranger clothes. 

It was this that convinced the sword-hilt man to speak again; the look in Stephen’s eyes when he was curious.

“It’s a very special lamp,” the young stranger told him. 

“Who are you, then? How do you know?”

“I’m its rightful owner,” the man said gruffly. “Or at least, I am one of them.” 

Stephen looked at the chain, hearing the way it shifted to match the cool music of the stranger. “Are there more instr—lamps here? Will you come back for them?”

“No.” From the curl of the man’s mouth, he said it shortly, impatiently. 

He turned, his hand lifting from Stephen’s shoulder to twine around the chain. He lifted the lamp into his hands. A frown brushed his features as he looked between it and Stephen. 

“It’s not supposed to do…” he began, but shook his head and pursed his lips before he finished. 

“What?” Stephen felt unmoored. “What is—what will you do with it?”

The man ignored him this time, striding away through the dusty store. Stephen raised a hand. His chest was filled with the urge, the need, to stop the stranger. But he swallowed it. He’d learned his lesson. 

“Wait!” he yelled, finally able to hear his own voice again.

But the young man and his song of books and swords was gone. 

(Stephen wouldn’t know the name of the relic for a great many years to come—but he would, someday. And someday, too, he would learn the name of the man.)

When school got out, year after year after year, Stephen would take Donna and Victor to celebrate with donuts. 

On the very limits of the subway’s reach was a tiny bakery. It was local and stood outside the traffic and crowd-songs of the rest of the city. The interior was homey, and there was always a constant hum of physical sound from the radio above the counter. It was Stephen and his siblings’ favorite. With some small and donut-specific thread of self control, they saved this shop for their end of year celebration and kept it secret otherwise. 

Each summer, there would be new flavors—wild flavors, the kind the kids never expected and were always excited for. And each summer, they would try as many of them as they could fit in their stomachs. Or as many as Stephen’s carefully budgeted funds could afford.

Donna liked the ones with rich chocolate or hidden aftertastes of coffee, and she’d taken an unexpected liking to the green tea donut the shop had served the summer she entered eighth grade. Victor always hoped they’d bring his favorite lemon pistachio twist back. Stephen liked the way powdered sugar sounded, and the unexpected taste of cinnamon and pineapple made this year one to be remembered.

“You can’t graduate,” Donna informed him through a mouth smeared with chocolate.

“Why not?” Stephen asked. “High school sucks, you’ll know next year.”

“But you’re only fifteen.” 

“I won’t be in December. I can slip out between semesters and avoid all the fanfare.” Stephen took another bite of his donut. 

He’d climbed his way through the school system with a tight grip on the music, ever since Nebraska. No one knew what to do with him—the boy that didn’t listen but read at unreal speeds and hummed tunes no one recognized. Stephen let knowledge settle alongside the melodies around him. It seemed to fit, always fit. 

And he loved the feeling. Loved it almost as much as the murmur of the watch on his wrist, the way the music felt when he understood. It felt like singing without the limits of his voice, of his physical form. 

So Stephen studied math and writing and science, studied how to appear normal, and knew that someday he’d learn what the music really was. 

“I think you’re cheating,” Donna told him. Behind her, the radio chattered about the death of an esteemed military engineer and his wife, though the music was too thick for Stephen to pay much attention. 

Stephen grinned at Donna. He chewed through the zinging taste of his donut. “Is it cheating to be good at something?”

“It’s cheating to be magic,” Donna laughed. She wadded her napkin into a ball and threw it at him. Stephen heard the oaky tenor of recycled paper. 

“Can’t help it,” Stephen said. 

Donna hummed. The teen had recently learned to curse when their parents weren’t in earshot, and she did so cautiously. “I just wish I could, y’know, tell people the truth. It’s so goddamn frustrating.”

Stephen winced. “Are the rumors bothering you again?”

“Bothering me?” Donna chomped aggressively on her donut, her fingers smeared with glaze. “You’re the one they keep calling all those… things. Why don’t you ever say anything?”

Stephen shrugged. “They’re not worth it,” he lied. 

Donna heard the whispers, sometimes, when he walked her and Victor home. Not once had she ever heard Stephen snap back. He knew it unnerved her when he was usually so quick with wit and insult, but Stephen didn’t like to tear people down on falsehoods. And the things the children said might be cruel, but Stephen couldn’t know for sure if they were really wrong. 

As long as the music sang in his ears, he didn’t mind. It was the world. The universe. It was who he was. Stephen wouldn’t give the music up for anything, not even answers. Not when silence lurked in his nightmares. Not when death would be so much better than that quiet.   

“Still,” Donna insisted. “I just wish I could tell them what you really are.”

Stephen’s mouth twitched up. “What am I, then?” he asked. 

(He wished he knew.)

“Awesome, of course,” Donna huffed. 

Stephen laughed. There was powdered sugar dusting his fingers, and Stephen licked it off and reached out to take his sister’s hand. “Don’t worry, Donna,” he said. “Soon, I’ll be out of here. I’ll be where I belong. Someday.”

I’ll know the truth.

For as long as he heard the songs, he would hope. 

When Stephen was a child, he thought no part of the music was ugly. 

The sound of cold was silver and clear, ringing like light through a prism. Hunger crawled in unique and twisting tones. Even sickness, the way it soured other music in unexpected ways, had a resonance that harmonized with the rest of the world. If these could be part of the symphony, surely the only ugly sound was the lack of any sound at all. 

Stephen had always thought that. But that was before he’d heard the song of death. 

It was worse, almost, because death’s song wasn’t horrid, not really. It was low and soothing and uncomplex, like a lullaby sung in darkness. Glowing eyes in an open throat. In the sea of unique life songs, death moved like an unnoticed, creaking wind. It had claws of ivory and harmonies of beauty. It was not like sickness. Death didn’t change notes, prowling with a rhythm like a heartbeat, never subtle. It didn’t possess songs like illness did. 

It just silenced them. 

“No,” Stephen said. The word spilled from his bleeding fingers and knees as rough as the music in his ears. “Stop, stop it, stop it—”

Lukewarm water stung his scraped skin. It was tinged red. The tile beneath him shone as white as bone, and Stephen knew it was, knew he’d peeled the skin back from the sticky surface of a skull and left bare ivory as the flesh of the earth. 

Under his hands, calm notes constructed the rhythm of a stopped heart. They were so slow, so slow they were nonexistent, and Stephen’s breath spilled from his mouth in gasps, in sobs. His panic turned the whole sky emerald. 

He could always hear the songs when he listened. He could always hear her song. 

But there was no songbird music or spring flower laughter to fall back on, anymore. There was no young soul to reach for. There was only the lullaby, sung in the voice of a child, sung in his own voice, as the waters rose around his ears.

“Help me!” Stephen screamed through the haze of music, his eyes wide. He didn’t know what was around him. Who. There was a body beneath his hands, and that was all that mattered. 

(It was supposed to have been fun. It was supposed to have been special. Donuts for his high school graduation and a fun day out to the pool today. It was supposed to be—it was supposed to—)

Stephen’s shoulders shook. He curled his hands around the fragile neck of the death song and felt his sister’s skin under his fingertips. 

“Donna,” he mumbled, his voice thick with water. 

She didn’t answer. Only the lullaby replied to Stephen, sucking the tones of the very universe into its abyss. 

“Shut up,” Stephen snarled through his panicked breaths. His eyes swam with water—his tears, the pool, it all sounded the same. 

The song didn’t listen. The songs always listened to Stephen—he would make them. Fingers digging deep into cold skin, Stephen opened his mouth, and magic joined his breaths. His own voice, bellowing a physical version of Donna’s song.   

It rang in his ears. But not in the right way, not in the fabric of stars and universe, and it was not enough, so far from not enough. Laughable, in its futility. Stephen sang as his voice choked off, rough and desperate, and the death song filled the negative space. 

Stephen pulled at it, wrenched at it. He changed its notes, with the same ease he changed ‘light’ to ‘dark’. But here, there was no song beneath that of death to uncover. No healthy song to reveal under sickness. Not anymore. Donna was only silence, and changing the notes of death only carved torn-flesh symbols into her body in strips. 

And when Stephen had exhausted his voice, exhausted his power trying to recreate Donna’s one of a kind music, he reached for the watch. 

He didn’t think. He didn’t have to. The timesong pooled in his body like his own life’s blood, and his heart pumped it just the same. Stephen poured the melody through his fingers, tugging at its overlaying strings, restitching its universal pattern. 

He rewound it. Commanded it. 

The lacerations left Donna’s body. The bruise she’d gotten falling from the apartment stairs two days ago disappeared. Stephen pushed her back through time, back to when she was okay. Alive. 

Back to when everything was how it was supposed to be. 

(“Race you to the far side, Stephen!”)

Back and back and back, Stephen chased the death song from his sister’s body. He left the reverse of age in his wake. But though time was built into his cells, he could not purge this orange sound completely. He could not control a soul.

That power belonged to something else. 

Tears ran down Stephen’s cheeks, the color of jade, as hands tore into him somewhere between the physical realm and his own mind; he couldn’t tell the difference anymore. He didn’t stop. Wouldn’t. Donna didn’t breathe, didn’t sing, and Stephen was terrified beyond nightmares that he would have to listen to that lullaby. 

Time skipped, respooled. Just for her, always for her. The song Stephen wrote pulled her back through her own life, no longer hers, and it sounded like the universe itself. It sounded like a little boy's sobs. It sounded like everything. 

(Anything.) 

And it was nothing more than a scream.

Eugene and Beverly found Stephen ringing with exhausted silence, blood dripping down his face, staining the bone around him. He was humming a broken song, and he didn’t speak. His spine hunched so far around himself that they mistook him, at first, for the one who had died. 

In the palms of his hands, limp and dead, he held a human fetus. 

“She wouldn’t come back,” he rasped. 

His mother screamed. The horror in the sound didn’t reach Stephen—hardly any sound did. Eugene’s hand on his shoulder, gripping tight enough to bruise, was the only thing that kept him from dropping into the watch’s song completely.  

The sky was still emerald. 

(It was the third time in his life that Stephen was called a demon.)

They told him to leave two weeks later. 

Beverly and Eugene spoke in voices soaked in grief, their eyes steeped in guilt, but their words were as clear as Stephen had ever heard them. The room was so loud, but Stephen knew it was quiet to them. Knew it had been quiet to them since Donna died. 

Stephen tried to make it better—or perhaps he’d been trying to make it worse. Every day, for as long as his breath lasted, Stephen sang. Sang, so he didn’t forget what she’d sounded like. Sang, so Beverly and Eugene and Victor couldn’t forget what he’d done.

What he was. 

So when they broke, Stephen wasn’t surprised. He’d expected this. He’d pushed for it, filled their home with strange colors and unnatural patterns, to see just how far he could push. How long they’d last. 

Two weeks. Stephen was worth two weeks. 

“We love you,” they said, their voices muffled thunder where Stephen lay at the bottom of the sea. 

Stephen didn’t say it back, eyes blank as he read the words off their lips. He didn’t promise he’d be fine. Later, he wished he had. 

Time moved on as he did. And time always left people behind. 

Medical school started as a prison, for a teenager in ratty jeans and hands curled over his mouth to keep in a song. But study was an escape. A refuge. A joy. Stephen never noticed until it had already turned into success—never noticed until he had already built it into the foundation of his spirit. Degrees and grades, knowledge and curiosity and understanding.  

Understanding sounded so much like the watch’s song. 

Stephen didn’t speak to his parents. He wrote letters, and Eugene and Beverly wrote back, and Victor did too. It was easier when they couldn’t hear each other’s voices. Easier when they didn’t have to see him listening to their souls. 

Stephen thought fear was too much work, now. Sadness was all he had room for; he liked its song better anyway. So he sang, even if it was without magic. He tapped the beats of his professor’s melodies on the sides of his desk. He learned sign language for when he couldn’t hear anything but the music, and he learned other languages for when he could. 

The first time he saved a life, it sounded like being born. 

Oh, Stephen thought, the scalpel slipping from his hand when he’d stepped back. 

So this was how things were supposed to be. 

He liked it. The music, the knowledge, the independence. He liked the way money sounded and the way the notes of tailored suits harmonized with clear windows and respect. He liked the sounds of watches. 

Stephen called his success memory and talent and it wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth. But what use was the whole truth to someone like him? What use was it to the songs that still continued because of Stephen, to Stephen that still continued because of them? It was dangerous, that truth.  

And when his parents died, Victor was the only one who knew it. But Victor had been young, and he would forget. Stephen would be safe. 

Safe.

Demon was the wrong title. Stephen was something else, something beyond else. But for his purposes, demon would do. 

Doctor Stephen Strange stepped onto the streets of New York, and the singing universe moved aside.