Chapter 174: The Ancient One's Warning, and Strange the Errand Boy
Ethan left Wong mid-sentence — politely, with a raised hand that promised the dim sum conversation wasn't over — and crossed the courtyard toward where the Ancient One was standing with Strange.
He looked at Strange's face and read it immediately.
The arrogance was still there — Strange was constitutionally incapable of entirely setting it aside — but underneath it was something different. The specific expression of a person who has just been offered exactly what they wanted and is recalibrating whether they deserve it.
She said yes.
"Can he start now?" Ethan asked the Ancient One. No preamble. He already mostly knew the answer.
"Strange." The Ancient One turned to him. Her voice carried the particular quality of someone who doesn't need to raise it to fill a room. "Mordo will take you to change your clothes. He'll begin your instruction after that."
"Yes, Master."
Ethan blinked.
He'd known Strange for years. He had never, in all that time, heard that particular combination of words in that particular tone come out of that man's mouth. Strange addressed most people as though they were interesting specimens. He addressed people he respected as peers. He addressed authority figures as temporary inconveniences between him and whatever he was trying to accomplish.
"Yes, Master" — deferential, immediate, unqualified — was new.
Ethan didn't know what the Ancient One had said to produce this. He suspected it had taken approximately one sentence.
He was right. The sentence had been: Do you want to surpass Ethan Cross? Then learn from me properly.
Strange had, apparently, found his motivation. He had swept every reservation aside and was now genuinely prepared to wear the robes, follow the curriculum, and apply himself with the same absolute focus he brought to surgery. All of it pointed toward a single goal that had been quietly sitting in the back of his mind since college.
If Ethan had known this, he would not have been offended. He would have been delighted. Strange learning everything, Strange becoming Family, Strange's entire magical education flowing back into Ethan's own pool — the whole thing worked perfectly in his favor regardless of Strange's motivations.
The future Strange, returning from two and a half years of intensive Kamar-Taj training with the absolute conviction that he could finally beat his old roommate — that was going to be a very good day.
Strange followed Mordo out of the courtyard without looking back, wearing the expression of a man who has committed.
The Ancient One waited until they were alone.
Then she looked at Ethan with the directness that was, he'd noticed, her natural mode when she wasn't performing patience for someone who needed it.
"You shouldn't have brought him this early," she said. "He hasn't gone through any of it yet."
Ethan understood what she meant. The car accident. The hands. The loss of everything he'd built his identity around. The humbling that had made the arrogance navigable, had burned off the parts of Strange that would have made him genuinely dangerous with this much power and this little wisdom.
"He doesn't need the accident," Ethan said. "Don't underestimate him. He'll get there without it. And if he hits a wall I'll back him up."
The Ancient One looked at him for a moment.
She wasn't disagreeing. She was doing the thing she did — running the futures, checking the branches. But Ethan suspected that the futures had gotten considerably harder to read since he'd arrived in this universe, and she was working with less certainty than she was accustomed to.
"The future is going to be worse than you're expecting," she said.
"I know."
He did. The canonical arc had already been altered past recognition. The Avengers were scattered. The clean version of the Infinity War setup — unified heroes, established trust, everyone in position — didn't exist anymore. When Thanos came, or when something equally bad came, the people who were supposed to be standing in the way would be a loose coalition of a neighborhood in Manhattan, several former enemies, and whatever Ethan had managed to build in the meantime.
That was why he kept pushing. Why the family members needed to be stronger. Why the training cohorts mattered. Why Pietro needed the Enel template and Wade needed the Hidan template and Strange needed to learn every spell in Kamar-Taj's library.
Future Ethan's problem, he reminded himself. Current Ethan handles today.
"Stay alive longer," he said. "Teach Strange properly. Help keep the Earth covered." He said it lightly, like a reasonable suggestion between colleagues. "You can, you know. The death isn't mandatory."
He'd worked through the logic of the Ancient One's canonical death. It had been a constructed sacrifice — a choice to let the timeline run the way it needed to run so Strange would have no safety net, no backup, no option but to find the bottom of his own potential. It had worked. The Ancient One had died to give Strange a specific kind of necessity.
But Strange was already here. He was already motivated. He didn't need necessity — he had competition, which was honestly a stronger motivator for someone with Strange's temperament. The whole sequence that had required the Ancient One's death had been rendered unnecessary the moment Strange walked through a portal this morning.
"My situation is not as simple as you're imagining," she said. There was something in her voice that wasn't quite resignation — more like acceptance of something she'd seen clearly for a very long time. "I have looked into the future more times than I can count. Every branch eventually leads to the same place. I've made my peace with it."
Ethan said nothing.
She wasn't asking to be argued with. She'd made a decision about her own life, her own ending, with full information and full awareness. He respected that. You couldn't help everyone. You could help the people who wanted the help and let the others make their own calls.
He breathed in. Nodded.
The Ancient One watched him, and thought things she didn't say. She'd seen, in the branching possibilities she'd spent her life navigating, that Strange was never going to escape Ethan's orbit. The man called it friendship. From her angle it looked like Strange had found someone whose ceiling he couldn't see and had decided that closing the distance was his life's work. That wasn't a criticism. It was just what it was.
Future Sorcerer Supreme, she thought. Running errands for the Lord of Hell's Kitchen. She felt a complicated fondness for them both.
"Come," she said. "I'll take you to meet the king of Asgard."
A portal opened behind her — gold light, crackling edges, the same mechanism Ethan used, executed with the ease of someone for whom it was as automatic as opening a door.
Beyond it: Asgard.
Ethan stepped through.