FIC: Paradoxes (MCU, Wanda Maximoff, PG-13)
SUMMARY All roads lead here.
AUTHOR'S NOTES Written for saiditallbefore for Every Woman 2016. Set primarily after Civil War, but covers quite a bit of ground re: Wanda's life before Age of Ultron.
I got my feet on the ground and I don't go to sleep to dream.
--Fiona Apple, “Sleep to Dream”
It takes a while for the drugs to leave her system. There is still a bruise on her vein, and Wanda remembers too well the feel of the syringe pushing under her skin, the burn up her arm as the medicine entered her body. They bound her arms and attached a collar that monitored her vitals and sent a shock if she moved too much. They were afraid of her, she thought. Then: I could spend the rest of my life like this.
She isn't. She won't. She is tucked away in a corner of the cargo bay with thick blankets on her and no one's eyes. Her head swims with the drugs they gave her, and she closes her eyes, imagines she's on a hot air balloon ascending. The plane hits turbulence, and Wanda's head bumps against the floor.
It's a small plane; Wanda can hear them in the cockpit talking. There are agencies looking for them, not least of which the UN, Interpol. Their head start only buys them so much time.
Wanda flexes her hand, watches the knuckles contort, waits for the energy to weave itself around her fingers. It comes out in wisps, the drugs still dampening her abilities. She is stronger now, stronger than she's ever been. She's learned a lot since Sokovia fell, since the world changed. They were redrawing maps to show the absence, and Wanda put her head down and focused on burying hers. She carries Pietro being gone, carries him still, like a stone in her gut.
They separated them when their powers were first developing, probably because the other subjects were dying. The serum killed a few on infusion. Some died because they couldn't control their new powers. A boy who could fly fell out of the sky; a firestarter girl burned herself up. Wanda and Pietro were put in adjoining padded rooms. Wanda would listen to Pietro trying to catch up with his body, the way his heart raced now, leaning her head against the padded wall until he stilled, exhausted.
“If I had my power before,” Pietro said through the wall, “I could have stopped it. Everything.”
It's a paradox, Wanda thought: if the shell had never hit the building, if Pietro had swept her and their parents up in his arms and out of harm’s way, he never would have volunteered for the experiment to make him fast, as fast as he would have needed to be.
She can't think about that, about the life they could have had. Instead, she said, “Oh, so you're faster than a missile, now?”
“Faster than a speeding bullet,” he said, and she wanted to laugh and she wanted to cry all at once.
In the cargo bay, Wanda thinks of something she often does: what she would have done if she had her powers the night their parents died. She could have put a force field around them, protecting them from harm. She could have swallowed the shell up, held in the explosion and dropped the bomb, nothing more now than crumpled metal, to the dinner table. A centerpiece fit for the lives they'd be saving themselves from.
Of course, Wanda holding an explosion had caused this current war. She closes her eyes. They showed the twelve dead on the news, smiling photographs from before she'd killed them. The images have branded themselves upon her brain, and she doubts she'll ever forget them.
She shouldn't. She knows she shouldn't. Every time she thinks, even for a second, about forgetting, she thinks of Pietro’s little picture, thinks of holding it to Tony Stark’s face and saying, “Here. Remember.”
Some asshole said that your life is shaped by a series of decisions. You control your own destiny. Wanda knows that's bullshit. The thing that defined her life, that missile, was made by someone else, was launched by someone else. Tony Stark and the militants who bought his missiles changed her life for her, defined it. And Wanda knows that she has done this, now, to other lives. She thinks of the pain when she felt Pietro go, pushes on it like her tongue against a cut in her mouth; she has caused this pain in countless others. She is the bullet in their backs and the missiles pinning them beneath their beds. It's not fair to forget. It's her job to carry this.
The fog shrouding Wanda's mind is clearing. She spins her index finger and red tendrils of energy--stronger now and more vibrant--wind around it. Wanda pushes the heavy blankets off her, sits up. She pushes her hair out of her face, and with one hand on the fuselage bracing her, she comes to her feet. Wanda walks toward the voices in the cockpit. It is morning, and it is bright, and Steve and Bucky are only silhouettes against the light. Wanda looks past them, and looks at the sky.