へ(゜∇、°)へ We’ve been fighting for three hours and I’ve never hated you more sex (snickers evily)
Human languages were fascinating. They were case studies in disillusionment - the perpetual torture of meaning being separate from reality being separate from the word. It was true of all of them, and the many ways in which they articulated and interpreted their small view of the grand old universe were oh so entertaining. Twisting the humans’ words against them was so simple when there were so many of them to use, and when the panoply of human weaknesses was as vast as the stars themselves, there was no shortage of avenues to pursue.
It spoke to the importance and power of these strange constructs when one of the greatest titans ever to exist, an outright icon of tyrannical force, chose to seek out and employ a master in the art of words.
Or perhaps, more specifically the art of warring with words.
On Earth especially, wars had been staged for far less. They had in the history of humanity been waged for resources, greed, outright lies. But the tools that accomplished these grand crusades had not been weapons, but agendas. Ideas and ideologies put into words and used to convince the masses into acts of the greatest violence.
Maw liked that the humans, the backward, tiny race that they were, had annals devoted to the art of war. And he liked even more the poetry of these volumes being locked into words.
Which was not to say that he liked humans. They were most often shallow, pithy creatures to be sure. Observing them felt to him like documenting the behaviors of lesser forms of life. Less so in direct comparison to himself than as to what he had seen out there in the universe. Humans rarely held the capacity to surprise or impress him, though he made it a point to know how to access them like he did for so many others. Access among humans was an easy thing to garner if one was willing to kill to get it, and Maw held no qualms over exterminating these tiny creatures.
Save perhaps one - one whom he could and likely should have killed many times over. It was hardly out of sentiment or attachment for the man himself that his hand was stayed. It wasn’t even because the man had posed a relative challenge. What kept him coming back, teasing that boundary which hemmed in the outer limits of his abilities, kept him flirting with disaster and the ruination of that one spare human, was inspiration.
Stephen Strange was the only human Maw would ever credit with being inspiring, and it was only because he was so much more to Maw’s own life experience than his humanity or selfhood could encompass. Interpersonal connection had nothing at all to do with it, save for perhaps so far it insured the control he held over Strange. Instead it was Strange’s place within Maw’s own crusade which brooked him so much leave - which allowed him to still be alive if not irrevocably damaged for the experience of having him under his skin.
For Maw was well aware the hatred he inspired. When he had first dug his claws into Strange it had been a struggle to domineer his mind, which was a not inconsiderable champion of reason and insight by human standards. But reason and insight, wisdom and logic, were simple things to maintain in the cold abstraction of higher thought. When it came to the body, the heart, those untenable things that were life and soul, higher thought was feeble armor. Higher thought was easy to fumble, if one could trip it up with the undeniable truth that not everything in the universe was fair or made sense. These little infractions reminded that the control empirical thought offered was false, and a shallow high which only temporarily diffused much deeper concerns.
Such infractions were where he made his mark, and where he had finally managed to corner the sorcerer’s weakness.
Because it hadn’t taken long to tap just the right nerve. And Strange did have so many nerves to choose from. But they all fed back into a fundamental anxiety which was rooted to the core of the man himself, and therefore creeped its way into all of his superficial issues: the desperation felt at a long-standing understanding, but attempted ignorance of, how little control one had or ever could have in the mortal life. Even with the power of the universe at his fingertips, the knowledge that there were still some things which could not be changed bothered Strange.
Inevitability of any sort could singlehandedly draw him into a rage, and Maw was keen to employ that knowledge to his advantage. Both before and in the instance that had played out that evening, strategizing with that knowledge in hand had led to brilliant results.
As Maw saw it, anger fed into fear, and fear made the souls of men penetrable. And in having made Strange angry, in having exposed his fears, his soul had nowhere left to hide.
The sex, well. That was just salt in the wound. Maw was the twisted sort that did so enjoy the games, in sewing dragon’s teeth - Earth languages did have such colorful turns of phrase for the disasters which constantly plagued their tiny existences - and so the sex was just another hook to dig in so as to insure his control.
Sex in itself was much more akin to chess than humans gave it credit for. For them it was insert tab A into slot B, fuck, repeat. If they were lucky they might even have a chemical attraction to the person they were dabbling with, and if they were especially disillusioned they believed that there was love in it. The simple fact of the matter was that sex was never selfless enough to peaceably encompass that messy, infantile construct humans called love. Sex always contained just enough selfishness to taint it, or in the least to allow it to become tainted over time.
Walking in with that expectation of it, he found, opened up vastly more opportunities for it to be useful. He knew that even as powerful of a mortal as he was, Strange had been enculturated by the propaganda that sex was not a tool.
Which made it all the easier to use it against him, Maw had postulated. A theory which he now had categorical proof of.
It had been proven in the way Stephen had handled the proposition. Insofar, of course, as Maw had even given him a choice. While not time immemorial, it had been long enough that a lack of breakthrough, a lack of progress or perhaps even a lack of avoidance, had begun to rankle the sorcerer deeply. The danger of that powerful mind being left to its own inferencing was one he had deemed to allow on the bet that something would come of it which could be used in his favor.
What he’d found, eventually, was that same buttons which he had employed with Strange for so long: the man was exhausted by his existence, vastly under-appreciated, and desperate to please. In this particular circumstance, Maw had elected to employ a tool he used only sparingly so as to maintain its potency. And while Strange was in fact no stranger to sexual dalliances, he was almost completely naive of the effect that positive reinforcement, especially so closely on the heels of the risk of profound perturbation, could have on the psyche. Quite likely because positive reinforcement was something which he did not get often enough to spare him from its novelty.
It was one of many holes in his armor which Maw was in an abstract way grateful for, especially because they led to such elegant developments.
The elegance was not, however, to be found in the human body he had made use of that evening, which he acknowledged even as he lingered in its vicinity. Strange slept tensely, his shoulders drawn in and his expression pinched and kept his tender, broken hands close to his chest both to ward off contact and to shelter his cracked little heart. He slept as if he were bracing for the disapproval which would come in the morning, for the inevitable disappointment his actions, which were so often expressions of the desperate loneliness he felt, seemed to inspire. But Maw was far from disappointed.
Well, perhaps he wasn’t, but not in Stephen. He was disappointed in how easily the world had let this golden opportunity slip through its fingers. Because the fact was that if Stephen had a network of support, if he were well-integrated and cared for, chances were that his more immediate weaknesses would have been unaccessible, or in the least, less vulnerable to being preyed upon.
But the world, all the people he saved and the heroes he helped, had missed out on the chance they might have had to protect him. People presumed that the Sorcerer Supreme was an independently secure resource - one that didn’t need safeguarding because more so than even some of the other heroes, he was the protector. Their folly was that they didn’t know him well enough, didn’t know enough about his position or his personality. It could have been so easy for all of them to collectively spare him the small courtesies he would have needed in order to remain strong. Stronger perhaps than Maw could have handled without needing to kill him. But they had fallen down on the job, and it was to their ruin in the end for having done so.
Yet still, if there was one thing which he felt he could rely upon in any circumstance, it was the fragility of Stephen’s faith in himself. His ego, which had been warped so badly by his experiences so as to oscillate between hubris, humor, and heartlessness, could not abide with having to ask for basic human courtesies like companionship and protection. Those, to his poor mind, were privileges to be earned, and ones which he did not have the right to ask for given the importance of his independence. The weight of his title left him trapped like Atlas, or perhaps more like Sisyphus, struggling between his duty to his task and the belief that he was not strong enough to have been trusted with it at all.
Fundamentally, Stephen Strange’s soul was weary. And he hid it behind the fear of what would happen if he were not there to do his job, and masked that yet behind his anger toward himself for not being able to go it alone.
The man was ripe with the potential to be manipulated, and it was by sheer force of his own will that so very few other humans had ever managed to do it. In that regard, stubbornness alone had saved him in the past.
Until, of course, someone as skilled in the craft as he had come along, and not only seen but tapped into that wellspring of potential. To imagine what any human or cause could do with him as malleable as Maw had him now felt shameful, for how messily and wastefully the Earthlings would have undoubtedly used him.
In that way, perhaps, Maw had become somewhat possessive of the thrall. It was why he’d wiped Stephen’s memory - to hoard his death from even Thanos and keep it for his own. To draw out one of his masterpieces so as to test even his own limits, and the limits of his craft.
Because the bruises he’d left on the man, the bruises Stephen had let him leave, were nothing short of art. They were the beginning of the end - the block of stone out of which he would make his Pietà, the final work which he would make Stephen into. And though that ambition was great, he knew now that the finished work was not out of his grasp to accomplish.
For now, he would savor in the process. For the journey, as the humans so often and emptily said, really was its own reward.
He settled a long hand over the man’s navel. That in and of itself was an interesting word - and English interesting for being a bastard child of so many languages - traceable down to the archaic term for a shield boss. The navel of a man was counterpoint to his heart: one was the origin of his life, the other of his life force. But the heart was such a heavy organ, and the navel such a tender and personal point. It was the point at which a man could be most reliably moved, his bodily center of gravity. It was also physically one of the weakest points in the abdomen.
It was an area full of connotation - and he a master at exploiting connotation, and like all other things, this too he could weigh in his hand to use against Strange. To move him even in sleep in the direction he wanted. The human psyche was a complex but brittle thing, and there were small factors like touch which it absorbed so raptly it could scarcely stop itself. It was what made sex such a potent implement, a means of psychic driving so subtle its effectiveness was almost impossible to divert.
Strange only stirred slightly at the touch, and for a while longer he would stir for no Earthly reason. Maw had instructed him to sleep while the man lingered in the post-coital haze, and so he would. But more than any other Maw knew the importance of how susceptible the subconscious was during sleep, knew that the metaphorical knife he had wedged in the other man, which Strange himself could observe but neither feel nor remove, could be twisted in even deeper with the use of these quiet opportunities. Each moment which was utilized to that end was one more careful chip moving toward the perfection his sculpture.
“You did so well for me,” he crooned, leaning his presence and weight over the other man as he whispered in his ear. He’d discovered early on that Stephen was somewhat of a claustrophobic - hated being held or tied down because of how many times those experiences had nearly killed him. It was a button which Maw had pressed often, that domination over his personal space. It was one he had used even earlier, but that night for the purpose of turning the association of that entrapment to his benefit. “I’m so very pleased with you.”
Still, for all his careful tuning, it was fascinating to him to observe how the human reacted. Though at the increased contact his body had stiffened, it unwound in jerky increments, as if his mind were still unsure whether or not to feel relieved by his tone and his presence.
He felt it most under the hand he still had rested on Stephen’s abdomen. The muscles there fluttered, contracting in uncertain subconscious flinches before finally relaxing. The man hardly had an ounce of fat on him, but feeling a body hardened to meet the demands of such a trying task as being Sorcerer Supreme softening because of a few carefully selected words filled him with delight. That delight stemmed from the dark knowledge that he could so easily spill those softened guts carefully coiled in the core of the body beneath his hand. It was a power of closeness few in the universe could understand.
And it was what made him deadly good at his job.
Now, however, was not the time to shed that blood. Stephen’s fragile mortal form had more yet to give, and Maw would have it all before the end. He would do it carefully as he always had - so carefully that whether in apocalyptic circumstances or not, deviating it would prove impossible.
Maw would simply put him to bed that night, but one day he would indeed put him to death. It was only just, only poetic, for the being that had revealed the fabric of the man’s existence to be stained with uncertainty and doubt to be the one to deliver the final blow. By the time they were finished, Strange would be his crowning achievement: a man made so desperate for resolution that he would embrace death at the hands of the man who had pushed him to such extremes. He would lie down, as he had tonight, in the arms of the being tasked with destroying him, and like now, end the day relieved of his terrible burden.
For the time being, Maw was thoroughly satisfied with leaving the bruises around the man’s throat and the words in his ear. One careful chisel-stroke at a time, those words would be enough to complete his pièce de résistance in the end.
