2 Chapter 1 Flashback and Adapting (Edited)

<Back in the year 2022, somewhere on Earth>

I don't exactly remember what I was doing, but I think I was at home, engrossed in reading. While I was reading, I heard someone knocking on a door. Not my room door. From what I remember, the knock was coming from somewhere inside of me. The intensity of the knock was increasing every second and my heart rate was also increasing. I had a feeling that something was going to happen, something very bad.

The knocking came to a point that my head started hurting slightly. After a few minutes, the knocking stopped and my surroundings became silent. Then I heard a very loud sound, which broke something like glass and also something inside me, and just for a split second, I saw something beyond my imagination. I know my brain can't imagine something so spectacular, something so vast, something so big, and out of this world.

I saw. I remember my perception going far away from my body and then it broke through something. Something like a wall or a glass wall. I broke through 100 or 1000 of them in a single second; it felt too painful in that split second, and the next second I was free of the pain. When the pain was gone, I opened my eyes thinking it could be a dream, but what I saw brought me back to reality.

I saw a person lying on the floor of a grey room filled with books, a vast number of books too much for a single person to read in his lifetime. Then I saw the person fading. He was losing his yellowish colour, becoming more transparent, becoming more light. I tried to help him, but I was blocked by a wall, a thin wall of glass, which I punched. I hit it again and this time harder and cracks started forming on the glass.

I punched it a few more times. It was almost on the verge of breaking, just one more punch and it would break, but then I saw the person. He was nowhere to be seen. He was gone and then I saw the glass breaking into tiny pieces and disappearing into nothingness. I went inside the room, wondering if there was anything inside that I could use to find out where I was.

Just when I reached the centre of the room, I heard another crackling sound. I turned around as fast as I could, and I saw the wall was repairing itself, and it was thicker and looked more durable than before. Seeing it, I panicked and ran towards the wall, trying to punch it with all my might, but it didn't even shook. After tiring myself out, I gave up. My non-existent body began to feel heavy.

I could feel something flowing inside and filling me with colour. It was memories. Memories of someone else. It was like seeing a movie, a very long and boring movie, with little to no fun. It was like a recording of every second of someone's life. I thought how could someone remember so much about himself and then it happened. I definitely saw it before falling unconscious.

A man driving a super car at night at high speed and losing control over it when he crashed into another car and from the impact, his car rolled down. After multiple rolls, the car finally stopped and after that everything was blank. I remember the same thing happening to someone else, someone who I saw in movies like Doctor Strange, more specifically Marvel movies. I was fucked.

And then I fell unconscious.

<After an unknown period of time>-New York, 2010-

I woke up not inside my room, not even in the room in which I was trapped. I was in a hospital. I was afraid to look at my hand. If it were broken, then my fear would come true. I somehow managed to look at my hand and saw 2 hands wrapped fully in bandages, leaving just the fingers and some stainless steel rods attached to my hands.

I started to panic. My heart rate was rapidly increasing and the alarms started ringing. After a few seconds, some people came in. They were running around me trying to understand what was happening. There was also a female doctor who was trying to calm me down but nothing worked and I again fell unconscious.

When I regained my consciousness, I wasn't panicking. I was trying to accept everything that was happening to me. I tried to look at the window of the room. I saw the night sky. It was peaceful. It looked like everything was frozen in time and I was alone with a sky full of stars.

After some hours of thinking, I came to the conclusion that there is no benefit in thinking more. I will think about it as the time comes. And after that, I went to sleep again.

The next day, when I woke up, I saw Doctor Christine Palmer, the former colleague of Dr Stephen Strange, beside me.

"Hey, it's okay, it's going to be okay," Christine said.

I looked towards my hand and said— "What did they do?"

"They rushed you in a chopper. But it took a little while to find you. The golden hours of nerve damage went by while you were in the car," Christine replied.

"What did they do?" I asked again.

"There are 11 stainless steel pins in the bones. Multiple torn ligaments, severe nerve damage in both hands. You were on the table for 11 hours," Christine explained.

While this was happening, I was thinking what to say. If I say something wrong or different from what the original Stephen was supposed to say, then the timeline would deviate from the canon and it would be noticed by TVA (Time Variance Authority) and Ancient One. TVA will erase me, and I don't know what the ancient one will do. She would be losing the next candidate for her seat. And then I did the best thing I could do in that moment.

"How could they do so badly?" I questioned.

"No one could have done better," Christine responded.

"I could have," I said solemnly.