Never let it be said Carol Danvers didn’t learn her lesson and learn it thoroughly.
Her fling with magic had been disastrous - exhausting, spirit-dampening, and really fucking frustrating. There were spots of time during the entire ordeal that she’d felt more hopeless than she had in years, even during some of the worst of her battles out playing Boss of Space back home. She hated feeling that way, hated even more that she’d made Emme feel that way, and that she’d put Stephen through seventy-two hours of dealing with her powers when he never should have been in that position.
It was over now. She’d gotten them switched back and swore up and down she’d never make another spell-casting attempt. Stephen had made jokes about a magical, blood-binding contract, but Carol insisted it wasn’t necessary. Magic was best kept to the magically-inclined. She would love it from afar, support her friends and her girlfriend and their future kid without trying to mess with it herself.
She figured the least she could do to make up for the drama she’d caused was take Stephen out for a drink. Which was why she’d ended up inviting him out to meet her at Al’s. It was earlier in the evening, so the place wasn’t packed yet, and Alex had served them herself before disappearing into the back, saying something about inventory.
“So,” she said, holding her bottle up and grinning at him. “To the soon-to-be-married man. Consider this a tamer version of whatever the hell Tony’s probably planning.” Clink and drink.
Al’s Dive Bar was honestly one of Stephen’s favorite places, and not just because regular, Earth-based alcohol now tended to get his stomach churning like it was a busted, cheap hotel ice machine. But because the intimacy of the place was appreciated - like the Sanctum, it was bigger on the inside than it seemed on the outside yet felt cozy regardless; the stage was small, good for karaoke, and live music only added to the charm of the place - he wasn’t really one for playing pool either, yet would sometimes watch those who came in. It seemed different from other dive bars too - not as, uh, unclean? Granted, sticky floors and used plastic cups had a certain appeal too but Stephen preferred ‘intimacy without the staph infections,’ thanks. So it fit the bill.
Plus he could come here and down all the alien booze he wanted and no one would bat an eyelash - the bottle he had now was something new, something completely foreign to him but it tasted like sweet cocoa and was a bit nutty. He didn’t question it - just drank it, clinking his bottle against Carol’s with a sheepish laugh. Winding down a little after that body swapping mess was necessary - it seemed they both learned valuable lessons there. Carol would stick to not magic (being less than amazing at everything didn’t mean she was any less of a hero) and Stephen didn’t have to fix everything himself - he could rely on others, since likely he’d still be swapped if he hadn’t trusted Emme to come help using the power of a pep talk.
“Is he even planning anything?” Stephen postulated hypothetically and he honestly had no idea, but he trusted Stark. Weirdly enough. “I’m looking forward to it, honestly. It’s just so insane - the most terrifying thing I’ve ever done. Thanos pales in comparison.”
“Thanos was a little bitch compared to getting married,” Carol agreed with a laugh. The prospect wasn’t quite to the it’s real phase for her, but it was on her mind, and yes, it was terrifying. In a good way, the kind that made butterflies flap wildly in the pit of her belly just at the thought, but scary nevertheless.
Realistically, obviously the Titan who literally wiped out galaxies with a snap of his fingers was the absolute worst, but that wasn’t a problem here. Yet. And if it became one, they’d be fine this time. The only Infinity Stone here was the Time Stone, so there wasn’t much damage Thanos could do in that respect. But that was a rabbit hole for another time.
“Can’t say I’ve asked if he’s planned anything, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Any feelings about strippers? I bet he can request specific species,” she teased. She took a sip from her bottle; this was one of the newer Vallo-made mixes Al’s had taken to stocking lately, and she was a fan. She liked the little cocoa-and-nut aftertaste it left in her mouth.
Strippers. Stephen smirked, in a oh no, why kind of way - while he was tempted to go for something unorthodox (Wanda wouldn’t even mind, she’d probably be fascinated enough to want to watch as well) he really didn’t need tits to have a fantastic ‘bachelor party’ or whatever the current term was.
“Well, the market Wanda found that has all of the food I can eat, the stuff she’s going to use to cater the wedding, is beneath a strip club,” he shared, lifting the bottle to take another drink - this stuff didn’t even really taste all that alcoholic, which was dangerous. It was also potent so he’d get three or four bottles in and need to be scraped off the floor - there was maybe something a little hardy about his durability (there was that pumpkin bomb, conveniently stuffed into the Macchina di Kadavus, which exploded in his face after all) but he didn’t have a Captain Marvel tolerance if he was in his own body. Or even a super soldier tolerance. “We went there and saw an orc being motorboated. It was an experience.”
Did he want to motorboat an orc? Well. Not really. But he could see how others might want to.
Carol let out a surprised laugh. “Sounds like it. Conjures up quite an image in the brain.” Leave it to Stephen and Wanda to find a weird food market beneath a strip club, of all places. She knew most of the alien hotspots, but this one didn’t sound familiar. She’d have to get them to give her an address so she could go check it out at some point. She liked to be up-to-date, keep an eye on things. Old habits die hard and all.
“You’re gonna be great, though,” she continued, flashing him a smile. “You’re a good guy, and you’ll be a great husband. Wanda couldn’t ask for more.” She meant that, too, and not just because she counted Stephen among her closest, best friends (although that probably inflated her opinion a bit). “I’m so ready to get all suited up on your sex mountain.”
Some people had candy mountains, some had sex mountains. Stephen was pretty damn proud of the (literal) explosive relations he and Wanda got up to sometimes - but magic was just like that occasionally; it reacted to intense situations. It was like a collision of stars, two nukes of equal power slamming into each other - and during that time, after Stephen had dreamed of his and Wanda’s home world, his own emotions were running high.
No doubt he’d be an emotional mess during the actual wedding ceremony too - marriage wasn’t something that he ever envisioned for himself. How could he, when the idea of love and romance left him terrified - the drizzle of cold needles, a chill that felt like the early onset of winter and something he very clearly ran away from. He’d lost Christine, fully knowing that he was meant to sacrifice his own personal interests, his personal life, for the sake of the greater good - and then he’d come back from being Blipped for five years with not much left.
He had yet to learn how to move on in that world - he wondered if he ever would.
“You think so?” He smiled, but there was a bit of nervousness there. “I really want to be a good husband. And...I’m happy. I think it’s actually okay to be happy too, and to think that maybe I deserve that.”
“You do deserve that,” Carol replied at once. He did. She knew he thought he didn’t sometimes, and she had thoughts like that herself from time to time. The hero gig was a big deal, a time sucker and a life sucker, and a lot of times, it felt like personal lives took a backseat. Or were just axed altogether, like hers had been for ages.
Vallo gave them the opportunity to flip all that on its head. There were plenty of heroes here, and they didn’t all have to converge on whatever monster-of-the-week to make this new world of theirs safe. They got to do things like this - date, get married, have families of their own. It was pretty damn cool.
Another drink from her bottle before she spoke again. “So, not to bring up that body swapping incident again, but I have a…sort of related question.” She surveyed him, trying to find the exact right words to use. She didn’t want to offend him, but she was curious. Living in someone else’s body, no matter how briefly, would do that to you. “Your hands… Why haven’t you fixed them?”
“Oh - ” Stephen blinked, setting the bottle down. He supposed he shouldn’t be too surprised that this question came up - after all, Carol had been in his body for three days and that was plenty of time to notice that he lived with chronic pain. The scars had healed, somewhat, but overall his hands were a mottled Frankenstein-esque mess; they were pins and steel rods that held his bones together, the nerve damage too severe to ever really truly be fixed by surgery - the agony burned during rainstorms the most, when every flash of thunder was a flash of hurt that raced, with pounding accuracy, up his wrists and his arms.
It, luckily, hadn’t rained during their brief body swapping adventure - but the point remained. His hands were fucked. And in his body was a way to learn that firsthand.
He glanced at the scars, the ones that ran up his fingers and were a constant reminder that his career as a neurosurgeon had been poofed into oblivion. “I technically could have,” he replied. “The Ancient One even said as much. She gave me a choice - fix my hands and turn back to my old life, or devote myself to the mystic arts and find a new purpose. Step up. Protect the world, because it’s not about me. I use magic to keep them in working order, channeling a little.”
That bit of magic, however - it was necessary for him, in the day-to-day. He was thinking of the future a lot, like how he wouldn’t be able to pick up Iryna or change a diaper if he didn’t steady his hands enough - and that was enough reason to learn balance, control with magic. But the small, delicate cuts of surgery? Hours hunched over a body on a table? No, he couldn’t.
“I think having them not be fixed is a reminder of how far I’ve come, and how far I have left to go,” he added thoughtfully. “I’ve left behind the life of a surgeon anyway.” Besides, there was probably some truth to the notion that his abilities, his power, came from within - he technically didn’t need hands regardless.
Carol was glad that Stephen had taken the question in stride. She knew it may be a touchy subject, and the last thing she wanted was to hurt his feelings, but he seemed unfazed. And the answer he gave - well, it made sense to her. She knew that choice. They weren’t exact mirror images, not by far, but she knew what it was like to take on the duty of protecting people over more personal matters. It was just another thread of what they’d been discussing the whole time.
“I get it,” she said with a nod. “Thanks for not telling me to fuck off. It’s just… something I realized while we were swapped, and I couldn’t help wondering how you even functioned. It felt like this mixture of being stabbed and being on fire almost all the time, in a bad way.”
Obviously, she was sure her body had been no walk in the park for him in entirely different ways. She’d seen him struggle to control her powers which was completely fair. She’d freed her own powers all at once, become this livewire or raw power, and there were things that came with the package it had taken her time to control, given she was quite literally made of burning cosmic energy.
Stephen tossed her a fondly exasperated look. “I wouldn’t tell you to fuck off,” he assured. “I think it goes against the best friend rulebook.” Because that’s what she was, right? He actually wasn’t sure - it had been so long since he’d had an actual best friend to call his own; the whole term reminded him of elementary school days, pizza in squares and cartons of milk and trading lunches. Maybe when kids still covered their books with paper grocery bags and then doodled on the covers, turning something boring into personalized art. Either way he was glad for it - and he supposed that after swapping bodies with someone, that really would nudge someone into the best friend category after all.
“Magic helps me function though - but when I don’t have it, everything hurts. The Murder Mansion place was kind of rough.” He’d been experiencing incredible pain that he just didn’t really want to talk about with anyone - floating in the void chat had actually been a bit of a blessing, in that regard. Easier to ‘type’ when you didn’t even have hands that ached, at least.
Carol preened. “Totally against the rulebook,” she confirmed, leaning in to gently nudge his shoulder with her own. She was careful, much more cognizant now than ever of how much pain he was in - not just from what he was saying but from having experienced it. The hands were obviously the source of it all, but she remembered some sparks making their way up her arms. She should have realized he controlled it with magic, but given how terrible she’d been at accessing his magic, it wouldn’t have made a difference anyway.
“Wish I’d been there to help you out,” she said. Watching the Murder Mansion had been hard. She made jokes and tried to cheer Stephen up, but those first two days, watching the shit they went through - it hadn’t been easy, and she’d been worried. “Being without magic must have been a bitch to deal with.”
“It was, but - ” Stephen shrugged. “Not surprised that this place would do that to any of us. We really just can’t be certain of anything.” Even staying. He’d already faced so much pain - in Dormammu’s domain, playing the role of both jailor and prisoner; eventually (and after a thousand or so deaths) his nerves had been fried into non-functionality and that had been his only mercy. Stephen had endured it, and the far-off reach of victory and how certain he had been of it kept him dizzy, kept him going.
He had faced torture, sorrow, heartache in every future he’d lived in the moments between heartbeats when the universe held its breath, there on Titan - but none of that compared to what it would feel like to lose. People, that is, here in Vallo - he held them so dear to him. So close. To not have that would be devastating.
Yet he couldn’t focus on that now, could he? “I think - pretty much anything else, we can tackle together,” he added with a crooked smile, sliding his beer bottle toward him again to nurse the drink. Maybe order another. “You have me for that, at least.”
“I’m glad I have you,” Carol said, sincere without a hint of snark. It didn’t happen often, but she knew when to take the right moment to make sure the people she cared about knew it. Stephen was high on that list. She didn’t know if she’d ever get close to him at home the way she had here - unlikely, with all her extraterrestrial outings and his home base being Earth. But she had him here, and she took no pleasure in seeing him suffering - or in the idea of losing him if Vallo decided to drop the hammer on them someday.
“I don’t know if you’ve caught on, but I kind of like you.” There was the teasing again, a playful glint shining in brown eyes. She couldn’t hold onto the seriousness forever - sue her. She’d been plenty serious for a lifetime; this was the place where she got to cut loose and feel more like a person again. And part of her personhood was doing her utmost to out-snark her buddies. “In the most best friend-ish way you can imagine.”
No stranger to snark himself, Stephen appreciated the precious mode of communication for what it was. He was a totally different person, for the most part, from when he’d originally began as one of the world’s top neurosurgeons - a warmth, his magic, had been born out of skin and bones that were damaged but he still maintained at least some sense of humor.
“I like you too,” he replied with a deep rumble of a baritone laugh. “Definitely in the most best friend-ish way I can imagine. And that you can imagine.” Maybe that was enough sentiment for the time being - he had opened himself up to friendship, and love, and that certain type of love found within friendship but he was also a curmudgeonly old man to some degree too and - who authorized having this emotion.
Not him, that was for sure. “You want me to buy you another?” he asked, motioning to the bottle. She got the first round but he could get the second. It was what friends were for.
“You’re buying nothing,” Carol insisted. “These are on me, since I got you stuck in my body for three days.” She’d sent him off for drinks the night they swapped back, before she’d whisked Emme back home to make up for three days of being kept apart, but she still owed him. After tonight, she’d consider them square, so maybe next time she’d let him buy.
“But I’ll take more.” That bottle was long-ago polished off, and she looked past Stephen, catching the bartender’s eyes and raising two fingers. Not five seconds later, two more bottles of the same slid effortlessly down the bar; she passed one over to Stephen before popping the tops off hers. “Your toast, Master of Magic. Make it good.”
Stephen chuckled throatily. “Okay, fair,” he agreed, taking the second bottle gratefully - he waved his hand over the top, his own cap making a plink sound on the bar when he used a bit of telekinetic magic to open the drink. “Surely there will be another opportunity to get completely shitfaced before the wedding, and I’ll buy plenty of those rounds.” He made good money here - may as well put it to a good cause, right? Like Rosalind’s law school fees, or whatever Peter wanted to further his education - and a ton of alien booze, yes. That too.
But let’s see - a toast. What could he come up with? Something more cheerful than you’re born in pain, you live in fear, you die alone, Merry Christmas. He tapped the bottle against the cupid’s bow of his lips and then finally decided. “Strike hands with me. The glass is brim, the dew is on the heather. And love is good and life is long and friends are best together.”
Cheesy? Yes. Then he added, “Oh, and ‘that’s all for now, I gotta pee.’” It was the abridged version of a toast but it worked all the same. Clinkie (and drinkie).