@wizardstrange
Okay, maybe she hadn't been the kindest. Kindness, in some ways, wasn't in her vocabulary. It wasn't in her innate nature to soften blows or sugarcoat unpleasantries. Softness was not favored in the Dark Dimension; kindness too easily became synonymous with weakness in the minds of the Faltine, and they had bred out any inklings to lean that way throughout the centuries. Before she had even met him, Clea had known that Stephen Strange had messed up. He had created an incursion and now someone had to fix it. Clea had enlisted herself to be that someone, but her annoyance ran high.
Why, then, did she feel the softness creeping in?
It had begun at the Baxter Building. The fanged spider-hero — Miguel O'Hara they called him — had come at Stephen for his errors. He hadn't been wrong, exactly, in his judgements, but he hadn't entirely been fair either. A streak of protectiveness had begun to burn in Clea that she hadn't expected. This would be no surprise to her mother; Umar had long believed her daughter to be too soft. Maybe that's why she had entangled herself with Stephen Strange and his problems: despite her best efforts to the contrary, Clea cared.
The kitchen she found herself in was an unfamiliar one, as was the Sanctum Sanctorum the multiversal refugees — or so they had been called — had taken shelter in. It made more sense to stay there than the Avengers Compound that had been offered. The downside, of course, was co-populating with a multiversal variant of herself that was married to a Stephen Strange with a sickening devotion. So far, she had been able to avoid them with varying degrees of difficulty.
On this morning, however, Mr. & Mrs. Strange were not in the Sanctum. Clea hadn't asked where they were going. Instead, she had busied herself. A royal by birth, the kitchen had never been a place for her to spend her time. Still, she would make do. An apology for almost throwing Stephen under the bus wasn't on the table; she hadn't actually done anything. Still, a part of her longed to be comforting and not hostile. They needed to be allies in this strange ( no pun intended ) situation they had found themselves in.
"You've slept half the day." The words were spoken over her shoulder as Clea summoned two mugs to pour the boiling water into. She was too embarrassed to admit she didn't know how to work the coffee pot, so tea it would have to suffice. "You didn't happen to dream up any missing memories, did you?" Stephen had seemed on the verge of a panic attack with the accusations being thrown at him — accusations he claimed to not understand or fully remember.
There was a moment of silence as Clea shifted from one foot to another, one nail tapping at the glass of her mug. "Stephen." Her lips pursed. A sigh. "We're allies in all of this, and I acknowledge that I may have been...harsh. So. I apologize." The apology she had said she wasn't going to give felt clunky and awkward, but it was there nonetheless. It was a start.
It was bizarre, to wake up in a Sanctum that wasn't his own for the past week. Everything was mostly the same way he assumed he left things back in his own reality, but there was a certain offness about the entire thing that he couldn't shake.
The twin bed he found himself sleeping on was certainly one of the most glaring changes. It didn't help that there seemed to be a shortage of rooms, so the Clea from his reality was forced to share a room with him.
The two of them clearly didn't see eye to eye on most things, so the irony of being confined to the same space together wasn't lost on him. The other variants of themselves appeared to be married, which only added to the discomfort, but Stephen opted to occupy himself with other things-- like trying to recover these memories he was apparently missing.
A meeting with Spider-Man was certainly on the table, but that required going out to try and find him, and Stephen at least needed a cup of something before that. When he finally strolled into the kitchen, he eyed the mugs Clea was filling with water and took his from mid-air when it was filled, softly rolling his eyes at her comment as he grabbed a tea bag and moved to sit down.
The meeting at the Baxter Building mentally drained him, there was no denying that. He didn't feel like responding to her comment about sleeping for most of the day, but he did respond to her next words. "No. I have... fragments. Nothing of use."
Stephen tried to make it clear from his tone that he wasn't in the mood for whatever else it was she was going to try and nag him about, but to his surprise-- and apology came out of Clea's lips. He tensed for a few seconds afterwards as he dipped his tea bag into his mug and furrowed his brows, like he was waiting for another shoe to drop. But when it didn't, his face softened slightly.
"It's alright. I'd probably be frustrated too if I was in your position. I've been... reckless, as of late. Apparently more reckless than I can even remember."
