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Chapter 98
Technomancer in MCU
New York, Earth
–Stephen Strange–
“I will be here at all times. If you need me, just press this button here and it will ring an alarm. If you have any specific dietary-”
“I am gonna stop you right there. I am a doctor and I know how things work. Now, why don’t you call my doctor and I can talk with him about my treatment.” He interrupted the nurse midway, frustrated with the way things had been going.
First of all, they refused to show him his charts, which was absurd and all his requests to get just a basic phone with internet on it were rebuffed. All he got was a call to Christie who should be on his way because his dumbass didn’t actually have any one he could put as an emergency contact, in his life.
Wasn’t that a sad thought.
A millionaire surgeon with multiple doctorates at the height of his career but nobody he can keep as an emergency contact.
He could hear the nurse breathe through her nose in an effort to stop herself from snapping at him before she just muttered “Fine” and left the room.
He still had not seen his charts yet and he was the best doctor in any hospital he has ever been in.
He had the urge to rub his forehead but he was reminded of his injuries then. Complete and utter paralysis from the neck below. He still had to take deep breaths and think of all the ways that this could be fixed in a bid to stop himself from going into shock again.
He barely managed to avoid another panic attack when he thought of the last sentence that Alfred uttered during their last conversation. It felt that the reason Alfred was telling him everything was because he was going to die. And he probably would have died in the crash. It was probably a miracle that he survived, even with the whole paralysis situation.
But how could Alfred have known it in advance?
Did he orchestrate the whole thing? But what could he have gained from his death?
Sure, he was a great surgeon and while he did like to think of himself as a very important person, even he was not delusional enough to think that Alfred, someone who is the closest to being an overlord because of the digital age they lived in, would take note of.
So why?
The question plagued him for a while before he heard the door open and he looked, only to see Christie crying in the doorway, followed by some pasty ass doctor.
“It’s not as bad as it looks?” He joked as a way to lighten the mood but he was pretty sure his attempt at a smile became more of a grimace due to how many drugs he was under.
That just made Christine cry more.
….
..
It had been a couple hours since Christine had arrived in the hospital. For the first half an hour, it was him who was consoling her which was made a little difficult because of his body not responding to his will. Then the next hour was spent going through his charts which were finally made available to them once they realised that there was someone else with him and he was not going to keel over or go into shock again after seeing his condition.
“So, this is it, huh?” He sighed in defeat once they had gone through the whole thign. The damage to his spine and all of his limbs was way too intensive for any kind of modern medicine to properly work with. He would be lucky to move a single toe in his lifetime.
“Don’t, Don’t say that,” Christine sniffed, trying to portray a strong front but failing spectacularly doing so.
“What else is left Christine? I know Modern Medicine and there is nothing in it that could solve my issue…. Whatsoever,” He slowed down as he realised something.
Son of a bitch!
He had forgotten about those miracle yellow pills from the Ascendancy. While the normal pills would not be able to do something so drastic as healing entire limbs from scratch or heal his spine without removing the splinters, he was more than sure that the stuff they had revealed to the public was just the tip of the iceberg. There has got to be more advanced medical stuff they had lying around that they were not telling anybody about.
He had to get to them. But how?
A proverbial light lit above him as he looked at Christine, “Do you have your phone with you?”
Christine looked at him, a bit confused but took her phone out of her purse, “Yes, of course. Do you need to call someone?”
He cursed internally once he realised that he would not be able to operate the phone so he instructed Christine on it, “Yes. Open the AlfredGPT website. I have something I need to ask him.”
“Ok. But how will you authenticate it?”
“Just open it, Alfred will do the rest.”
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“Okay.”
She opened the website and once the authentication part came up, she pointed the phone at his face. He just hoped that her older model could accurately recognise his face, given all the minor cuts and bruises that now adorned his handsome face.
“Identified, Stephen Strange,” The same robotic voice as before confirmed his identity before his chat history opened up. The weird thing was that the second Christine turned the phone towards her, it all went away and came back once the camera was turned back to him.
Alfred truly was tracking everything then, he thought morosely. If it was true and Alfred did have the kind of reach that he was thinking about, it would have been very easy for him to orchestrate the whole accident, especially since he could probably take control over the driving modes of most modern cars, his included.
“Hello Alfred,” He muttered whilst thinking of the questions he would like to ask Alfred. He would obviously like to ask him about the big Elephant in the room. If he had actually caused his accident but somewhere in his mind, he did not want an answer to that question. It would open a whole can of worms that he was just not comfortable with.
“Hello Stephen. I’m glad to hear that you survived the accident.”
All his reservations went out the window when he heard Alfred mock him about his accident that he himself may have caused.
“You bastard, you ruined my life. How dare you mock me again. I will come after you with everything I’ve got. I might not get to you but you can be damn sure I will be a pain in the ass to deal with. You motherfu-” Christine threw the phone to the sofa nearby before trying to softly hug him.
“Hey hey hey! I am here for you. Calm down,” Christine tried to calm him down from his episode but the mocking words of Alfred continued to ring in his mind, refusing to let go.
He may have said things in his anger but even he knew that they were nothing but empty boasts now. He may have had a chance at things if he had his most prized skills with him but with his body toast, all he had was money and to someone like Alfred, that might as well be worth less than monopoly money.
“What am I going to do, Christine?” He muttered, defeatedly staring at the ceiling. He might have had some hope with the treatment at the Ascendancy but with the way he spoke, there was no way they were going to give him treatment. Treatment that they had not revealed to the world yet. This was clearly going into a very depressing zone so he tried to change the subject.
“So, Christine? What;s going on with the hospital” Is everybody happy that I am finally gone now?”
Christine cried at his statement for some reason. Before he could ask her about it, she put her hand over her mouth and fled the room, crying.
He couldn’t even chase after her with his bloody body.
“All thanks to you,” He said while looking at the camera in the corner. He was sure he was under surveillance since he was aware of something that nobody else knew. Atleast, nobody in the public knew about Alfred’s actions.
“What will you do when I go public, huh? I can go to the government with this information and with the history I have on my acc-”
“What history?” He heard Alfred’s voice before he could complete his sentence.
His neck slowly turned to look at the phone that Christine had thrown nearby.
“I thought you were smarter than that, Stephen. I know you are quite aware of the fate that would await you should you try to do something foolish like causing panic and chaos in the society by revealing confidential details about the Ascendancy. That would put you in the sights of both your government and the Ascendancy as well and let me tell you, without any limbs to use, that would be an impossible battle for you to win,”
Stephen looked at the phone as the reality of his situation was shoved in his throat, forcing him to finally accept his helplessness. He didn’t even have the will to reply to Alfred’s message anymore. He just laid there, looking at the ceiling for what felt like hours.
Even when the nurses came to change the IVs, he just laid there silently, not as if he could move or anything anyway.
“Stephen, Stephen!” The voice of Christine took him out from his daze.
“Wh-What?”
“Look, who is here,” The excitement in Christine’s voice made him take a confused look at what she was pointing at.
His eyes widened as much as they could when he saw Tony Stark standing in front of the door in a three piece suit holding a fruit basket in one hand and his phone in the other.
“Hello,” Tony greeted him with a smirk on his face. He then proceeded to unceremoniously start eating the apples from the fruit basket that was supposed to be for him.
“Do you mind?” Tony had the audacity to ask him once he had already taken a bite out of it.
He just deadpanned at him, having no energy to engage with the manchild. He might have had hope of Stark helping him but he was sure that rejecting his request to perform his arc-reactor removing surgery robbed him of any goodwill he might have had with him, which was non-existent to begin with anyway.
It was not his fault that he didn’t take over cases that he was not sure would succeed and doing what was essentially an open heart surgery without any precedent of such a surgery, he elected to reject the case.
Ofcourse, the surgeons in London were equally as proficient and even successful judging from the smug smirk that Tony gave him.
“Alright, I’ll bite. What do you want, Stark?” He asked once the silence in the room became a bit too much for him, especially with the disgusting sound of Tony chewing the apple more than necessary becoming a background noise for the room.
Tony looked at his eyes for more than a moment before spitting what was in his mouth along with the apple in his hand, into the nearby dustbin. He then looked at him and said, “Never really liked them. Prefer pretty doctors much more than them.”
He then proceeded to pick up Christine’s phone from the sofa and sat on it.
“That’s actually mine,” Christine piped up.
“Oh yeah, I know. I just need it for a bit.” He then proceeded to do something to her phone which caused the phone to emit a shrill noise before Tony threw it in the dustbin as well which promptly began smoking as well.
“Welp, I tried. Jarvis?” Tony muttered seemingly to himself.
“Authorities are already on their way, sir. Might I suggest moving Mr.Strange and Ms.Palmer to the Stark Advanced Medical Wing since I have a premonition that the room they are currently in, will soon be inhospitable due to the chemical based fire of the lithium battery in Ms.Palmer’s phone.”
Tony then slapped his knee and stood up, “Well, you heard the man. Let’s go. The room I have in mind is much better than this cell of a room.”
Saying so, he left the room whistling, all the while he and Chrsitine looked on with bulging eyes, at the audacity of the man.
Soon after Tony left, the room was flooded by nurses who immediately wheeled him out of his room and then, to his alarm, out of the hospital as well, despite him not agreeing to anything.
“Wait, where are you taking me?”
“Doctor’s orders, Stark Medical Wing for your next treatment. Get comfortable, we will be there in about two hours. I’m told that Ms.Palmer will be joining us there as well.”
Goddammit Stark!
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Word Count - 2214
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