MCU Fic: "High Priestess In Red" (Scarlet Witch, PG-13)
Title: High Priestess In Red
Characters/Pairings: Wanda Maximoff (Scarlet Witch), Loki, Pietro Maximoff (Quicksilver), Erik Lensherr (Magneto), Steve Rogers (Captain America), Carol Danvers (Ms. Marvel), Dr. Moira MacTaggert, Dr. Leo Samson, various others; implications of Wanda/Loki, Loki/Darcy Lewis, Wanda/Steve, Wanda/Carol, and Moira MacTaggert/Charles Xavier
Rating: PG-13 for angst, darkness, off-screen temporary character deaths, implied violence, unbalanced relationships, mental illness, and Magneto's questionable parenting skills
Length: 8,390 words
Summary: Wanda Maximoff has a gift of powerful magic. To learn to control it, she's going to have to be taught by someone strong.
Notes: Set in the same ongoing series as nearly all my other Loki-centric MCU fics. (Chronologically it starts somewhere after Shadow Puppets and spans up through most of the other already written stories.) This was originally posted over at AO3 in February, and can be read there if you prefer.
An odd little stand-alone, really, and admittedly very self-indulgent. But I wanted all along for Wanda to have a presence in this universe and to develop her character, and there didn't seem to be a good place to do it inside any of my other stories, so I guess you could say she gets her own spin-off issue. Like the rest of the Marvel films this version of Wanda is a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll, which is to say she draws both from the 616 and the Ultimates continuities with a little from other influences thrown in. Oh, and not for nothing, but yes: the versions of Dr. MacTaggert and Doc Samson I picture here are the Olivia Williams and Ty Burrell ones, respectively.
0.
Her first clearest memory: she’s a little girl, and her mommy is dead.
They leave what’s left behind before the ashes have stopped smoldering. They have no home anymore. Daddy is taking them far, far away from the only place they’ve ever known. Daddy says it’s time to start over.
They have papers with names that aren’t theirs. She looks at the ground and holds Daddy’s hand, doesn’t say a word, because she’s a good girl.
Men look at their papers, look at her and her brother; look at Daddy. Finally they mark the papers with rubber stamps. Daddy smiles and talks politely in a language she doesn’t know.
The next part is the flying. Only it doesn’t feel like flying at all; it feels like sitting, for a long time. In the seat next to hers Pietro squirms and kicks his legs, restless and bored. She turns and presses her face and hands to the window, and looks out.
It only becomes ‘flying’ when she sees the clouds, and part of the metal wing of the big bird-thing that’s holding them, and realizes they’re a long way up, with the ground spread out like a drawing on paper.
She squeezes her palms flat against the glass, big young blue eyes wide, fascinated.
Daddy’s big hand reaches over and closes around the top of her head, stroking her hair. “It’s all right, Wanda. We aren’t going to fall.” His voice lowers. “Even if the machine these clever men have built manages to fail, I’ll certainly be able to catch us.”
She stays quiet and doesn’t tell Daddy she wasn’t thinking about falling. She was thinking about what it would be like to be out there, moving through the air, soaring, everything else so far below.
i.
When she’s twelve years old her powers come.
Instead of starting small and growing, everything changes at once. She’s feels something inside, a terrible strength underneath her skin she doesn’t understand.
When she looks around she sees what is, and what isn’t, and what could be at the same time. Nothing is solid. Nothing is safe. All it takes is a little anger, a little fear, or a little carelessness and anything can come undone.
Daddy is proud, and pleased, that his children would be early bloomers, that his children would be so powerful. He tells Wanda what she has is a gift. A tool that will one day be used in defense of their kind.
But first she must learn to use it.
He tries to teach her how. Every day for hours she sits in a chair - metal, in case Daddy needs to restrain her - and struggles with the shifting thing within her. She sweats and shivers, crying, her father’s voice loud and firm as he lectures her on strength and control.
But she has no control. Things around her explode. They crumble. They warp and change in dangerous ways. And the more she tries to keep it from happening, the worse it gets.
Everything around her is forces of the universe constantly shifting, silhouettes in red and layers of shadow, unnamable things just waiting to reach out and grab her.
Or to be grabbed by her. She doesn’t know which is worse.
ii.
By the time she’s sixteen it’s completely out of control. Everywhere she goes she creates chaos, and it’s never intentional. It’s never what she wants.
Nothing is what she wants.
There are voices in her head of things yet to come, things that exist beyond the warped layers of reality. Her dreams are always nightmares. Her thoughts are screams. She’s a walking storm of devastation that lashes out in surges, that swells and rises and crashes again and again like waves.
In the center there is her, frightened and helpless. Alone.
Daddy has given up. She can’t master this, and he can’t teach her, and it’s too dangerous to keep her around. He has important work to do - he can’t risk his enemies being able to find him because of his unpredictable, useless daughter.
In the middle of the night he takes her by the arm and leads her to the hospital. He knows the people there. Wanda doesn’t know them. She doesn’t want to stay here. She isn’t given a choice.
They hold her back when she tries to reach for her father, when she pleads with him as he walks away, saying “Daddy no, Daddy please, don’t go, don’t leave me!”
The walls are beginning to shake. But she’s just a slip of a girl. They pull her to the ground and stick a needle in her arm.
iii.
She spends the next two years sleeping.
Or not asleep - but not awake either. Never awake.
Everything is a haze, and blurry around the edges. The voices and the shadows and the real-not-real things are still there. They never really go away, which means she’s always nervous, but they can’t touch her when she’s like this either.
When she starts to wake up and her vision focuses and the lines come together jagged and angry and demanding, she shrieks and flails violently at everything around her. Ribbons of power lash out.
They say, “She’s too dangerous.”
So they fill her up with pills and little silver punctures until she falls asleep again. They try to never let her wake up.
Everything is gray and wrong, but at least it’s safe.
iv.
She spends most of her days with her head resting against the wall and in her dreams she’s floating while she never goes anywhere.
It’s all a cloud, she’s in a cloud, until one day she looks up and a lady is standing there. A pretty lady. A pretty lady who’s looking at Wanda and then who’s talking to the doctors and the doctors are talking back, and she’s having trouble understanding any of the words.
“Are you certain you have the proper resources and facilities to handle her? Her power levels are incredibly strong, and without the medications-”
“Yes, yes; you’ve made your reservations quite clear. Really, I think the fact that Professor Xavier sent me here should speak for itself. Believe me, my facility is far better suited to ‘handle’ someone with her abilities than yours obviously is.”
She twists her shoulders and flops over onto her back and lifts her chin to peer guilelessly up at the pretty lady.
The pretty lady smiles down at her, her eyes soft and reassuring, and so certain. “Hello, Wanda,” she says. “My name is Moira. I’m here to help you.”
v.
She spends the next years in Dr. MacTaggert - in Moira’s care. It takes a while for her to stop being sick because of the pills no longer in her system. It takes a while for her to get used to not sleeping all the time.
The world is strange and loud and bright, and she hasn’t had to deal with it since she was a teenager. But Moira lives on an island and in isolation. Things are much simpler there.
Moira isn’t special herself, but she’s worked all her life helping other special people. She runs painless tests on Wanda’s mind and body, and talks her down calmly when her powers flare up and she starts fires or tears things apart around her or unconsciously defies the laws of physics.
She never sees Moira upset, or afraid.
She is soothing and supportive, comforting and a little bit loving. Bit by bit she puts the pieces of her fragile charge back together until they resemble a young woman again. She is something like the mother that Wanda can no longer remember that she ever had.
Moira doesn’t yet understand how her powers work, but she is curious and oh-so patient. And Wanda is in no hurry to learn.
Many years go by.
She passes the time quietly re-teaching herself how to use silverware and read books, or sitting by a window soaking up the sunshine, staring at the blue sky above.
vi.
Moira talks to many people all over the world, for many different reasons.
Some of them are other scientists, other doctors like her. Some of them are colleagues, or friends. Some are more than friends (Professor Xavier, or ‘Charles’, is clearly one of those. But Wanda can keep a secret. Wanda never tells).
Many of them have one crucial thing in common: they want to help people who need it.
There is a man named Dr. Samson, and he wants nothing more than to help very specific type of people: people who are special, but also lost inside their own minds. People who are sick there, hurt, or just very, very confused.
In the middle of 2010 there are a flurry of communications between him and Moira, emails and phone calls back and forth. They’re dotted with phrases like “investors” and “building permit” and “private funding”.
The end result is that Moira is moving her research, and leaving her island for a little while - and Wanda is too.
Wanda is going to a new home.
vii.
The Mayfair Institute is advertised as a private psychiatric clinic and recovery center. It is located in the rolling green, woodsy hills of Maine, where the landscape is quite pretty and there is no one around for miles. That hidden isolation is not an accident.
It’s very hard to get to the institute unless you know what you’re looking for. There aren’t many signs. The website has no directions and you need to call first to make an appointment. The buildings are all clean white paint and new glass. The staff that works there rarely leaves, and when they do they’re very discreet.
The locals assume it must be a rehab for the wealthy and avert their eyes, losing interest.
The buildings that make up the compound look surprisingly small, but that’s only because most of the facility is actually underground.
Wanda has her own room with a bed and a small dresser and a sunlamp. She has to ask permission to go to another room, to use the bathroom or take a shower.
She wears soft slippers and a bathrobe over pale-colored pajamas. She takes exactly five pills a day and all of them are for anxiety. She has private sessions with Moira and Dr. Samson separately, where they work on her “issues” from both ends.
She eats three meals at regular times in the cafeteria. In the morning she has Tai Chi. In the evening she watches television. In the afternoon she has a group therapy session, where she sits between a girl who has both anorexia and pyrokinesis, and a man with schizophrenia and trouble staying on his meds ever since he gained odd abilities from an industrial accident.
In the afternoon she also has art therapy, which is maybe her favorite part of the day. She’s classified as ‘Tier 2’ because they aren’t sure if she should be allowed sharp things yet. She fingerpaints and makes things out of soft molding clay.
Her days are peaceful and one blends into the next. Her powers still make her nervous; the voices and strange creatures are still there. Occasionally there are incidents, but at least they’re contained.
She takes her pills and she eats applesauce with a spoon and carrots with a fork and she watches sitcoms or old movies in black and white and she draws strange, swirling patterns with bright splashes of color that don’t look like anything but for some reason make her feel better.
Wanda doesn’t really care if she ever gets to leave here. It doesn’t feel important. What could she do, anyway?
viii.
Dr. Samson is a nice man who knows a lot about people whose minds don’t work just right.
At first she’s intimidated by him, mostly because he reminds her of the doctors at that first hospital; the ones that didn’t try to help her, that just wanted to keep her locked away. But he shows her very quickly that he is nothing like that.
He spends the first few visits sitting on the floor by her, a safe distance away, talking softly and asking her questions about herself and how her day was.
After two weeks he tells Wanda that it’s his professional assessment that she has anxiety issues, emotional problems and a mild dissociative disorder. He also tells her none of that matters.
“You don’t have to think about things in terms of labels or a checklist, Wanda, and that’s how I try not to see my patients. I don’t want you to focus on what you ‘have’ or what you have to do to get rid of it. You should just be focusing on trying to get yourself well.”
“What does that mean,” she asks. “What will it be like when I’m ‘well’?”
He frowns a gentle, thinking frown and shrugs with his hands and says, “It will mean you’ll be able to interact with the normal world, and other people, and it will feel more or less natural to you. It won’t be a physical or emotional strain. You won’t constantly be overwhelmed, or worried you’re going to somehow mess up.”
Wanda can’t imagine ever being like that. She hugs her knees together and kneads her shirt hem in her hands and looks down, and after a moment tells him so.
He smiles and tells her that she doesn’t have to imagine it. She just has to be willing to trust him to lead her on the baby steps to take her there.
Wanda has one hour-long session with Dr. Samson every day of the week. Sometimes he lets her mumble on about any random thing she wants to talk about; sometimes he asks her hard and probing questions about her family, thoughts, and feelings. It depends on what kind of day it is, what she has the strength for.
She never really knows what she has the strength for, herself. But somehow Dr. Samson always does.
ix.
Moira and Dr. Samson and all the other mostly nice people at the Institute have been able to do a lot for her. But the finer points of how, exactly, her powers work remain a mystery.
From her tests Moira has determined what she’s specifically able to do is alter probability. If the probability of it raining is very low, Wanda can instead make it high, and then it rains. But it becomes much more, to the point where she can alter reality itself. That’s why everything around her looks abnormal. It’s because she can see the prospective realities all at once.
Her emotions and stress levels can cause the amount of potential energy she has in her body to spike. Dr. Samson works on talking her through her worse days and her panic attacks. He teaches her meditations and exercises she can do to calm herself down. It takes practice and effort, but she can keep the power contained.
But even with Moira’s research and Dr. Samson’s coaching, neither of them can guide her in learning all she has inside of her. They can’t really begin to know, because neither of them has firsthand experience with this.
They can listen to how she feels all they like. They can’t tell her what to do. No one can.
Until one day they say to her: “Wanda, there is someone very special here to see you.”
x.
The man that visits her in her room is tall. And pale. He has dark black hair, and green eyes that give her shivers to look too far into, and when he smiles there’s something…funny about the shape of his mouth. He’s almost more pretty than handsome, the lines of his face more finely formed than anything she could scrape out of clay with her awkward, trembling hands.
And there is something else about him. A presence. Heavy, and charged like lightning: it takes her breath away.
The area around him swims, he is teeming with so much power. Wanda is glad she’s already on the floor or else she would be weak in the knees.
She sits with her back in a corner and loosely hugs her legs, looking up at him. He looks back down at her searchingly, and smiles.
“Hello,” he greets her, and doesn’t seem to care that Wanda can’t say a thing. “So you’re the one they wished for me to have a look at. Wanda Maximoff,” her full name rolls off his tongue carefully; “you’re much more than what I had prepared for, what I’d imagined.”
He takes slow steps closer toward her. Not like he’s trying not to frighten her, but like he’s trying to drink her in.
The closer he gets, the more she becomes hypnotized. The energy off the two of them reaches out like desperate hands for one another, dancing together. She’s never experienced this before.
She’s met other mutants. She’s never met anyone like her.
“Who are you?” she asks in timid wonder.
“My name is Loki.” He kneels, close enough she can feel his breath, which is cool and sweet. (Moira and Dr. Samson watch from the open door. They might as well be on another planet.) “Son of Odin, prince of Asgard.”
The titles mean nothing to her but are said so regally that for a moment she can pretend that they do.
He stares at her with his green, green eyes, so terrible and beautiful, and reaches out to touch her face with the very tips of his fingers.
“So lovely,” he says. “So majestic.” He ghosts a caress over her cheek. “You have such power, Wanda. I’m here to teach you how to use it. Let me show you the way.
“Let me teach you how to use your magic.”
xi.
Loki’s visits aren’t like Moira’s, or Dr. Samson’s. They come very irregularly. Sometimes they are days apart, sometimes weeks.
But whenever they do come, they stretch on and on, often for nearly an entire day.
Loki says that her power - her ‘chaos magic’, he calls it - is out of balance. That she has learned to handle it all the wrong ways, suppressing it when she should be channeling it, fearing it when it should be embraced.
It is the best part of her, he argues. It is innate; it is her heart, her very soul. And she has let it grow unchecked, cowering around it and trying to force it through, when instead she and her power should be as one.
These are all things that Loki says. They sound lovely and amazing when they come from his lips, but Wanda isn’t sure she can believe any of it. The ‘her’ he describes is somebody she doesn’t know how to be.
She has never been in charge of anything. Let alone taken the reins of something so powerful for herself.
She tries to find a polite way to tell Loki that he’s wrong. That he must have made some mistake.
But somehow Loki has her paintings from art therapy in his hands. He spreads them out on the floor in front of her, and points to the squiggles and lines.
“Look,” he says. “Look. Do you know what these are? Even if you don’t realize it, a part of you already does.” His fingers trace briefly a green boxy-looking thing, a violet many-pointed star, a twisting orange oval. “These are runes, symbols of ancient sorcery.” His gaze is fevered as it hovers on her. “Some study for centuries to learn them, but you pluck them out of thin air. They come to you without trying, as easy as a dream.”
“Dreaming is anything but easy,” she finds herself whispering, throat dry, feeling shell-shocked.
Loki lifts his chin up further and looks at her from a different angle.
“No,” he agrees. “Learning to walk the many harrowed paths betwixt dreams, and shadows, and all the in-betweens, is very, very hard. It can take time. And effort. And at times, even, pain.”
Spontaneously he takes her hand in his, squeezing their palms against each other, fingers lacing tight.
In the space where real meets not-real above their hands, a spark of red and a spark of green strike each other.
Green and red are complimentary colors. Together they should make brown. But they don’t. Instead they retain their shades, meet one another, and bounce off. Wanda is mesmerized.
“But oh,” Loki breathes, “what wonders unfold before you, when you walk that path.”
xii.
“One step at a time,” is one of the first things Loki tells her. Another one is “Trust me.”
She has heard this all before.
But when Loki says it, she believes him. Something in her is drawn to him, wants to let him lead her wherever he will. She somehow feels, without any reservation, that it is going to be worth it.
So she trusts Loki, implicitly. She lets him become her teacher, her mentor. She lets him open her up to a whole new world of possibilities.
And it is hard. At times, as he takes her further and further, it even becomes dangerous.
But every day the swirling, changing multifaceted world around her makes more and more sense. Little by little, it stops being frightening, and even starts to be beautiful.
“You can see and hear things that most can never even imagine, Wanda,” Loki says. “Do not squander that. Look. Listen.”
She looks and she listens, and drinks in every far off voice, every blinding beam of light, and savors it.
xiii.
“Where your eye and your mind goes, your power will follow. Remember it is yours to master, not the other way around. Here, let me show you.”
Loki’s chest is to her back, shoulders lined up best as they can accounting for height differences. He covers her hand with his own and spreads his fingers, gently molding hers to match.
“Imagine you hold a knife in your hand. When you call on your magic, trace it along the edge of the blade, charging it. And then throw it.” He raises his arm; hers moves seamlessly. His eyes pick a random spot on the wall. “Aim for your target.”
He pulls just enough away so that the force behind the gesture is all Wanda’s own. She flicks her wrist and there it is, a burst of brilliant crimson. It snaps away from her fingertips and hits the spot.
Reality warps and suddenly, where there was nothing, the air is broken by the delicate wing-beatings of a few confused butterflies. Wanda laughs, delighted.
“At least that result was better than the last time,” Loki comments wryly.
Spinning the wheel of probability and potential at random, Wanda was somehow able to turn an ordinary sofa into an enraged charging rhino. Her face flushes at the memory and she looks down at her toes, abashed.
Loki catches her chin with crooked fingers and coaxes her up into meeting his eyes. “Not your fault. You’re still learning. But eventually, you will be able to do more than rely on chance and chaos.” His eyes are intense and serious. “You must be ready to bend and shape everything around you to your will.”
The idea of that ever being possible is staggering.
But first, Wanda thinks, she would probably have to uncover what her ‘will’ even is.
Loki is aware of this. More than once he has smiled at her, softly and crooked, and told her how lucky she is he didn’t find her only years before.
“My designs were quite different then. I would still teach you, but only with a purpose. I would’ve gladly made a puppet out of you. A pawn.”
She knows better than to tell him that doesn’t sound so bad.
xiv.
She thinks she is probably in love with Loki. But not in a way he should be worried about.
She knows that he has someone. He has mentioned her (perhaps on purpose, perhaps not) to Wanda once or twice. His love is already spoken for.
Besides, Wanda is weak and frail. Her words get stuck in her throat, when they even come at all, and she’s intimidated sometimes by the prospect of something so simple as turning a knob and walking through a door. If Loki smiles when he looks at her sometimes it’s because of her potential, and she hasn’t lived up to that yet.
People are afraid to get near her because of her emotional instability, her history of being abandoned. It makes her want to cling to everyone and make them all dear to her, to cherish every small thing as important and never let them go.
But no, she doesn’t feel the way towards Loki she imagines she would toward a lover. She loves him as someone who sees her in a way that nobody else does, as an inspiration, as a protector and a teacher and a guide.
He is bigger than her, awe-inspiring. He is her messiah. He knows the most intimate part of her like the shape of his hand: the mystic power that is her very soul.
She would never even try to kiss Loki. But if she fell, she would trust him blindly, unthinkingly, to catch her, no matter how far she tumbled into the dark.
xv.
And so when Loki says to her one day, all of a sudden, “Wanda, I’d like you to come somewhere with me,” it doesn’t matter why he asks.
It doesn’t matter that she hasn’t left Mayfair since the day its doors opened. It doesn’t matter that she can’t remember the last time she went for a walk by herself outside. It doesn’t matter that she hasn’t been anywhere, anywhere at all, except one hospital or research facility or another, since she was sixteen years old.
She doesn’t ask where Loki wants to take her or why he wants her there. She figures he’ll tell her once she needs to know.
All that matters is Loki is asking.
(And maybe, a little, that both Moira and Dr. Samson reluctantly say it’s okay.)
And so Wanda goes.
xvi.
Magic is less mentally exhausting than the outside world. She understands the former, intuitively. She looks on with calm inquisitiveness as Loki leads her by the hand through one of his hidden pathways, crossing the distance between here and there like folding two points together on a map.
At the other end, she blinks, disoriented. The room is big and open with no windows, bright with harsh lights. There are mats on the floor and a boxing ring. Weights and other equipment dot the floor. The air has the stale smell of bleach and old sweat.
It is so real, so normal. It’s disquieting.
She pokes one of the leather bags hanging from the ceiling with her finger and watches it sway on its chain.
Loki clears his throat. She turns her head, realizes there’s a man she didn’t notice before. Blond, well-muscled, he sits on a wooden bench with his body leaning forward, shoulders hunched, damp hair over his eyes.
Hearing Loki the man looks up at them. He has a strong, clean face that seems perpetually young, but there is a weight of pain and much older sadness in his clear blue eyes.
He gets to his feet and comes toward them, exchanging a nod with Loki. “So, this is the one you were telling me about?”
“Yes.” Loki puts a hand on her shoulder. “This is the incomparably gifted Wanda Maximoff. Wanda, this is Steven Rogers.” A smile briefly marks his face. “You may better know him as Captain America.”
When the captain reaches out his hand for her to shake, Wanda takes it quickly so as to hide her trembling.
“No doubt you’re aware of the group he belongs to, also,” Loki continues, after. “The Avengers.”
“Yes,” she manages to say.
“There have been some…recent losses. I’m afraid the team has suffered.” Loki’s words are grave. “Unfortunately, the threat they serve to counter has grown anything but weakened.”
Captain America makes a terse sound and turns away, shuddering. “SHIELD wants us to continue on. But if we’re going to do so, we need to rebuild the team from scratch.”
His voice is heavy with despondency as he stares at the floor.
“Barton’s dead…Banner has gone MIA. Agent Romanoff’s under deep cover and can’t be reached. Tony is in a coma-”
“Steve.” Loki cuts him off with sympathy. There’s pause during which the other man snaps out of his reverie and looks to him, and Loki touches him, voice soft. “I know.”
He leans on Loki for a moment, as Wanda hangs where she is, watching; the awkward silent spectator. “Sorry. It’s just-”
“This has been a hard time for you,” Loki finishes, understanding. “Though I can do nothing to ease the pain, I will do what I can to help.” He looks meaningfully to Wanda and after a few seconds the captain’s gaze follows.
He stands tall again, coming back to himself as he addresses her.
“So, how about it, Ms. Maximoff?” he asks. “Would you like to become an Avenger?”
xvii.
Wanda is not a hero. She’s not a fighter. She’s not a master of incomparable power, she’s only a vessel. She’s a recluse, a mental patient, a damaged girl who can barely take care of herself.
She doesn’t know why Loki, why anyone thinks she can do this.
She can’t.
“Wouldn’t you like to give your powers the chance to run free, to truly use them? To let yourself finally see what you’re capable of?”
Yes, she thinks, uncertain, begrudging. But…
“Wouldn’t you like to put your gifts to good use?” Loki continues, knowing he already half-has her. “To use them to help others?”
“I don’t know what difference I would make,” she protests. “I would only get in the way.”
Loki gives an odd grin. Like she’s said something funny.
“Believe me, you would not.”
When she stays silent, unconvinced, he continues more soberly, “Every hand that can be lent is needed. The Avengers need all the help they can get.”
Finally, in the end she decides to give in and give it a try. If only to see if she can manage to do more good than harm.
xviii.
Loki’s ways will part with hers from here on out. But before she goes, he gives her one last present.
He hands her a bundle covered in soft cloth, which she unwraps to find gleaming metal and spools of rich fabric. The breastplate is light, silver, molded to protect her torso in shapes faintly reminiscent of Loki’s gear. There are boots and gloves, a small headpiece, and wisps of a train that will fall from her shoulders when she stands, billowing dramatically without hampering her movement. Everything is colored in shades of dark purple and vibrant bright crimson, the red that matches the hue of her own magic.
“A mage’s armor,” Loki states, “forged by the finest hands on Asgard. A symbol of power, and prominence. You deserve nothing less.”
She touches the armor, delicately. Her fingers run along the seams of the leather gloves.
The outfit makes her feel at last like she is truly a magic user, a sorceress.
The first time she’s wearing it will be on her first mission. A SHIELD agent holding a clipboard will come up to her and ask what she’d like her codename to be - apparently it’s needed for the official record.
She’ll look away at her reflection in the nearest metallic wall.
She doesn’t see a slender, weak-kneed girl with pale skin and unruly auburn hair. She sees a composed woman surrounded by cascading waves of red.
“Scarlet Witch,” she says.
xix.
The new lineup of the Avengers is unruly, far from seasoned. They lack experience, have never fought together, and some of them are hardly friends. It’s difficult for them to get along, let alone stand side by side on the battlefield.
But the original Avengers began much the same way.
They have their trials. Their baptism by fire. And gradually there comes that shift. They go from being new recruits to warriors, from a ragtag mob to a team.
And the Scarlet Witch grows and grows in skill, and in confidence.
She relies on her teammates to help her. And they trust her to support them right back, are in awe of her powers, and have faith in her ability to control them.
Together they fight terrorists, supervillains, monsters. Together they save people. Together, they change the world.
Another day finds her knee-deep in rubble, gunfire and explosions all around, the others scattered out around her. Captain America uses his shield to guard a downed Namor and Thor whips his hammer around to send an attacker flying.
She stands her ground. Looks for any opening where she can be of use.
A wave of her hand and a fire hydrant dissolves, the uncovered burst of water toppling an enemy from his feet. Another series of gestures and the concrete ripples, warps into quicksand, sucking a careless individual under.
As Ms. Marvel throws one would-be opponent away from her overhand, using his weight to bowl a set of men down, someone else tries to sneak up behind her.
Wanda sends a blast of magic into the man’s face which becomes a thick cloud of mosquitos, and he staggers and falls backward on the ground, coughing, blinded.
Carol turned to see what happened and shoots her a bright smile, giving a salute before she flies away.
“Thanks, Wanda!” She winks.
“Look out,” someone yells, and Wanda spins in time to see an armored assailant reaching toward her. She makes a fist, shoving it into his chest. She has no time for finesse so she casts a ‘hex bolt’, one of her small bursts of random chaos magic. The spark of red fills her palm and shoots through her fingertips.
The force of the blow sends the man flying back, and as he lands, dazed, he’s quickly pinned by the tendrils of vines creeping around him out of nowhere.
The end of the battle comes not long after.
Like most others, it sees them victorious. This is a way of life for this team. This is what they do.
But all good things must come to an end. The team line-up changes: some new names leave. Some old ones come back.
Wanda stays. This is her home now. This is where she belongs.
xx.
Captain America is the first to accept Wanda, unthinkingly, as an Avenger.
He’s a good leader, Steve Rogers is. He gives confident orders in the field and steadying words of quiet reassurance off it. He looks at Wanda in a way that says he believes in her. He makes her believe in herself.
He trains her in hand-to-hand combat when she decides to learn how to fight. He’s honest with her, and never too easy. They spent hours alone together practicing, exchanging blows as he corrects her form, bodies moving close and sometimes locked together.
Steve is handsome. He has brilliant eyes and a soft, shy smile. He talks about history. He likes art. He smells good. Wanda watches the way his clothes slide against his skin, how his muscles tense and gleam as he works out, and bites her lip. She daydreams, sometimes.
But she never says a word.
Ms. Marvel is the first to take on Wanda, eagerly, as a friend.
She’s an amazing individual, Carol Danvers is. She follows orders, doesn’t seek glory, but she is so strong, and so proud. She soars into battle in a streak of gold with a grin, and it’s all Wanda can do to gaze on, awed and inspired.
She clucks her tongue at Wanda, teasingly, when she sees her lingering in shadows or hiding behind doors. Drags her by the hand, encourages her to be more outgoing, more social. They can talk for hours.
Carol is beautiful. She has flowing yellow hair and a dazzling, confident smile. She likes dancing, and reading magazines, and loves serving her country, and is unashamed of her body. Wanda leans into her hugs and watches her move graceful as a deer when she runs. There is a warm flutter in her breast.
But she never says a word about this, either.
She nurses her treasured feelings, alone and secret, and locks them away in her heart. Safe. Where they’ll never be in the way.
xxi.
She resigned herself to never having a lover, but she longs for a family.
A real family: of flesh and blood, life and birth. She wants it, maybe more than she’s ever wanted anything else.
She can’t explain it. She never talks about it. But she sees the SHIELD agents with their families, sees pictures of babies on the TV, and thinks, I want that to be mine. When she’s alone she closes her eyes and thinks about having children.
Until like many things she thinks about hard and long enough, it becomes so.
She isn’t surprised when a month later Loki comes for her.
He lets himself inside; walks in, silently, to find her sitting on the floor of the between two cribs. She watches her babies sleep.
“Wanda,” Loki’s voice contains shocked, repressed horror, “what have you done?”
She doesn’t look at him. She gets up. Leans over to smooth the errant locks of one son’s hair.
“I wanted to have children,” she tells him, simple. “So I did.”
He comes closer. She can feel him looking past her, at the contents of the cribs. She doesn’t dare turn to see what might be on his face.
“You created them,” he insists. “Out of nothing. You made life where none should exist. It should be impossible.”
He moves again until he is directly next to her.
“Or if not, it means that they should be abominations.”
“They are my children.” Voice small, she folds one hand over the other. “My sons. My little boys.”
She knows it. They never grew within her, they just were one day, but she feels a connection as deep and sure as she has never felt anything else. She looks on them and feels that love in her heart and knows they are hers.
And she would do anything, anything to keep them safe.
Fear spikes through her and she turns to Loki, desperate. “You have to help me,” she pleads, calling on their bond of these past few years. She squeezes his hand as she feels tears start to come. “Please.”
She’s known since the first moment it wouldn’t last. That there’d be a reckoning.
She couldn’t do something of this magnitude and not have any consequences.
Loki looks at her a moment, impassive, then past her again. Her nearest boy is waking and starting to fuss. Loki hesitates then reaches, lifting him in his arms with practiced care. He has children of his own, after all.
“His name is William,” she says, stilted. “But it’s ‘Billy’ for short. The other one is Thomas, or Tommy.”
Loki holds Billy upright, supporting the small head in his palm, examining his face. “A fine-looking boy,” he observes. “I think I sense future power in him.”
She grips onto Loki’s forearm. “Help me. They must be kept safe.” She shakes her head. “I won’t lose them. I won’t let that happen.”
Loki meets her gaze at last, frowning. Anxiety creases the area between his eyes.
“You caused a massive disturbance in this world’s field of mystic energy when you did this. It could be felt for miles around. It attracted the interest of more than a few parties.”
Her voice is hollow, dry. “Loki…”
“I’ve done what I can to cover for you. I told Dr. Strange it was my doing, the unintentional side effect of one of my ‘experiments’. And I asked Victor von Doom to leave it alone, as a personal favor to me.” He shakes his head in turn. “But this can’t last. It won’t be long before more grow curious, before someone comes looking. And when they find these children…”
Her babies will be taken. Feared, viewed as a potential danger, locked up to be studied.
“Please,” she asks yet again, “there must be something you can do.”
He shifts Billy in his arms, rocking him. Then he sets him back down. He turns to speak to Wanda’s entreating gaze.
“There is,” he tells her. “I can take the infants away. Give them to other families, hide all traces of them.” His face is solemn. “They would not be with you, but they would have safe, happy childhoods.”
She turns her back, arms hanging limply. The ground feels twisted under her feet.
“One day, eventually, you would be reunited. When it’s been long enough that any danger one could’ve supposed they’d pose has passed.” He clasps her upper arm. “But until then…Wanda, you know if left in your care, there will be too many who worry about what their existence could mean. They will never know peace.”
“I know,” she agrees in a mumble, trying not to sob.
She doesn’t dare ask how long it will take. She can’t stand to hear such an answer - one she knows he’d give, if she asked.
With anyone else there’d be denial. But this is Loki. What recourse does she have but to admit his wisdom? To yield to what in the sour pit of her stomach she already knows is the truth.
She must give up Billy and Tommy, for their own good.
Somehow she can’t feel wronged for it. Isn’t it way the universe is, after all? In everything there must be balance.
“No one can know. They must be concealed entirely. It must be like they never existed. No one can know,” he repeats, emphatically, “including you.”
She breathes in with a wet sniffle and doesn’t answer. Her eyes are frantic with misery. But of course - among those who will be looking are those trained to spot a liar, not to mention mind-readers, telepaths.
And she can’t tell anyone what she doesn’t remember.
Behind her back she can feel Loki eyeing the cribs again. “Promise me,” she demands of him, not turning around, “you’ll keep an eye on them. If I can’t guard them myself, I need you to see that they stay safe.”
“They will.” His response is emphatic. And it sounds like as he says it, best as he can, he is apologizing to her. “From a distance I will watch, and I swear to you that they will want for nothing.”
She nods and in doing so lets loose a broken sob. Gently she drops to her knees.
Loki crouches beside her, stroking back the tresses around her face, cupping the sides of her temple as she cries into her hands.
She tells herself that once the deed is done her loss won’t hurt anymore.
“Thank you,” the words come faltering, muffled, “for being so good to me. For using your power to help me…”
Loki’s eyes are wide when she lifts her head toward his.
“Wanda,” he begins slowly, “I have the experience of thousands of years, and secrets gained from walking countless worlds. But…you are far more powerful than I. I have skill; you tap into a strength that I will probably never be able to possess.”
He holds her face between his hands and his fingers start to warm with magic.
“And I am truly sorry you won’t remember this.”
xxii.
The Scarlet Witch is a superhero. She’s a household name. There are stories of her on the news nearly every month. There are many pictures of her on the internet. She has an action figure.
So after over a decade of being kept hidden, it’s be no surprise when that comes to an end.
She’s alone on the rooftop garden of Avengers Tower when she senses, hears sudden movement beside her. She has a flickering moment of alarm, then relaxes.
She doesn’t have to look. She doesn’t ready a defense. She doesn’t scream.
And she isn’t amazed that the person she knows stands next to her could get in undetected, either.
She knows he can move faster than even most advanced security systems can see.
“Hey there, Sis.”
“Hello Pietro.” She turns slow, unbothered, looking over her shoulder. “It’s been a long, long time.”
Her twin raises an eyebrow at her, as sardonic as she remembers without him having to say a word. He’s wearing a sleek armored uniform silver as his hair. He’s grown tall, muscled - but still skinny. Quicksilver. Her brother.
When they were young, they were close as two people could be. Even though they were both little he always said it was his job to protect her. But she can’t remember if he even tried to stop their father from taking her away.
She wonders if he thought through the years about where she was, what she was doing, the way she occasionally thought about him.
“You can sure say that again,” he quips. “What’s the matter - no hug?”
She turns fully to face him. She’s changed out of half her costume, but her arms are still sheathed in her scarlet gloves. Her hands curl into fists; Pietro fidgets like he’s nervous. There’s a cloth bandage around her shoulder. The wind is blowing her hair to her left side.
She doesn’t like to play games. She never has.
“What are you doing here, Pietro?”
He puts his hands on his hips and stands his ground. “What am I doing here?” he repeats in a lazy drawl, mocking. “What are you? Fighting alongside these flat-scans; letting them act like they could ever accept you-”
“They have accepted me,” she returns, prim.
“Sure they have. Because you’re useful.” He plays roguishly with his hair. “And because they’d rather have you on their side, putting your scary powers to use for them, than having to fight you.”
She doesn’t let herself sigh. “And why are you talking to me?” is her pointed response.
Pietro’s expression falls.
“I did think about you a lot, you know,” he insists. “And I’ve wanted to come find you almost every day, ever since we realized where you were.”
Her voice is uncompromising as she states what they both know.
“But you’re here because of Daddy. Because it’s what he told you to do. He wants you to convince me to come on your side.” Raised to be a soldier in an army fighting for mutantkind - following the orders of that intimidating man not just out of fear, but because of not knowing how not to obey him, how to do anything else.
She still remembers what that was like. Sometimes, she can almost feel nostalgic for it.
Pietro argues, “You belong with us. We’re your people, Wanda; your kind. If you joined the Brotherhood-”
“The Brotherhood is a terrorism group.” She hasn’t come so far to fall for this now.
He looks sullen, almost angry. “Don’t you think you should be with your family?” he demands.
She’s silent.
Yes, part of her thinks - she does. Her father and brother are all that’s left of a life she had once, long ago. In her heart a little girl named Wanda Maximoff whose mother just died wants to go running back to them. Wants to be wrapped up and tucked in, safe.
But does Daddy want her back because she’s his daughter, or because of her powers?
As long as she can’t be sure of that - and knowing the man that is her father, she thinks she can never be sure - her place isn’t with them.
“You should go,” she tells her brother gently.
He starts to reach for her. His expression turns more tragic. She knows he isn’t faking; Daddy doesn’t believe in that.
“Come on. Wanda-”
“Don’t make me ask you to leave.”
The words come out maybe cooler than she intended. Pietro flinches in surprise.
He tilts his chin, eyes aloof, frowning. He always acted like nothing ever bothered him. Right now, he doesn’t want to seem like he’s actually intimidated by her.
But they both know she could throw him off the roof, if she wanted. Probably with a twitch of her pinkie.
“This isn’t over,” he declares.
No. Probably not. And this is why Moira felt more confident sending her to the Avengers instead of the X-Men: because no one was sure how, all considered, she would handle having to face the Brotherhood.
But it seems like they have to go up against everyone, eventually. Maybe it’s only a matter of time.
Scarlet Witch turns her back on her brother. She folds her arms, keeps her head up, and breathes steadily as she waits for him to go away.
“You and Daddy can keep fighting for mutants,” she says. “I’m going to fight for everybody.”
xxiii.
When she was little the world was a scary place - bigger than her, stronger than her; and all she knew was her mother was dead, and she and her brother belonged together, and to believe whatever her father told her.
For years everything was power around her, nightmares, shadows, threatening to swallow her whole.
Lost and alone. Insane. Damaged. Unwanted.
But she knows different, now. She knows what can be done. What she can do.
There is beauty in the madness, strength in the chaos. Her strength. Her beauty. Her magic.
And she’s not afraid anymore.
She can change the world - make friends, intimidate enemies, share her feelings, bring her thoughts to life. She can make something out of nothing.
All she has to do is try, is focus. Ruby red tendrils of energy swirl around her, lifting her up, and no law, no force can push her back, can hold her down. Nothing can stop her if she won’t let it.
Not even gravity.
Wanda shakes her hair and lifts her arms, kicks up her heels and cranes her head toward the sky. Closes her eyes and threads through the reality around her, twists and bends it and remakes it as she will.
And just like that, up she goes. Higher and higher into the air.
She’s flying, rising, gliding on the wind. She’s a long way up and moving through the air, among the clouds. Her eyes open again and she smiles.
She’s soaring, and leaving everything else on the ground far below.
Characters/Pairings: Wanda Maximoff (Scarlet Witch), Loki, Pietro Maximoff (Quicksilver), Erik Lensherr (Magneto), Steve Rogers (Captain America), Carol Danvers (Ms. Marvel), Dr. Moira MacTaggert, Dr. Leo Samson, various others; implications of Wanda/Loki, Loki/Darcy Lewis, Wanda/Steve, Wanda/Carol, and Moira MacTaggert/Charles Xavier
Rating: PG-13 for angst, darkness, off-screen temporary character deaths, implied violence, unbalanced relationships, mental illness, and Magneto's questionable parenting skills
Length: 8,390 words
Summary: Wanda Maximoff has a gift of powerful magic. To learn to control it, she's going to have to be taught by someone strong.
Notes: Set in the same ongoing series as nearly all my other Loki-centric MCU fics. (Chronologically it starts somewhere after Shadow Puppets and spans up through most of the other already written stories.) This was originally posted over at AO3 in February, and can be read there if you prefer.
An odd little stand-alone, really, and admittedly very self-indulgent. But I wanted all along for Wanda to have a presence in this universe and to develop her character, and there didn't seem to be a good place to do it inside any of my other stories, so I guess you could say she gets her own spin-off issue. Like the rest of the Marvel films this version of Wanda is a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll, which is to say she draws both from the 616 and the Ultimates continuities with a little from other influences thrown in. Oh, and not for nothing, but yes: the versions of Dr. MacTaggert and Doc Samson I picture here are the Olivia Williams and Ty Burrell ones, respectively.
0.
Her first clearest memory: she’s a little girl, and her mommy is dead.
They leave what’s left behind before the ashes have stopped smoldering. They have no home anymore. Daddy is taking them far, far away from the only place they’ve ever known. Daddy says it’s time to start over.
They have papers with names that aren’t theirs. She looks at the ground and holds Daddy’s hand, doesn’t say a word, because she’s a good girl.
Men look at their papers, look at her and her brother; look at Daddy. Finally they mark the papers with rubber stamps. Daddy smiles and talks politely in a language she doesn’t know.
The next part is the flying. Only it doesn’t feel like flying at all; it feels like sitting, for a long time. In the seat next to hers Pietro squirms and kicks his legs, restless and bored. She turns and presses her face and hands to the window, and looks out.
It only becomes ‘flying’ when she sees the clouds, and part of the metal wing of the big bird-thing that’s holding them, and realizes they’re a long way up, with the ground spread out like a drawing on paper.
She squeezes her palms flat against the glass, big young blue eyes wide, fascinated.
Daddy’s big hand reaches over and closes around the top of her head, stroking her hair. “It’s all right, Wanda. We aren’t going to fall.” His voice lowers. “Even if the machine these clever men have built manages to fail, I’ll certainly be able to catch us.”
She stays quiet and doesn’t tell Daddy she wasn’t thinking about falling. She was thinking about what it would be like to be out there, moving through the air, soaring, everything else so far below.
i.
When she’s twelve years old her powers come.
Instead of starting small and growing, everything changes at once. She’s feels something inside, a terrible strength underneath her skin she doesn’t understand.
When she looks around she sees what is, and what isn’t, and what could be at the same time. Nothing is solid. Nothing is safe. All it takes is a little anger, a little fear, or a little carelessness and anything can come undone.
Daddy is proud, and pleased, that his children would be early bloomers, that his children would be so powerful. He tells Wanda what she has is a gift. A tool that will one day be used in defense of their kind.
But first she must learn to use it.
He tries to teach her how. Every day for hours she sits in a chair - metal, in case Daddy needs to restrain her - and struggles with the shifting thing within her. She sweats and shivers, crying, her father’s voice loud and firm as he lectures her on strength and control.
But she has no control. Things around her explode. They crumble. They warp and change in dangerous ways. And the more she tries to keep it from happening, the worse it gets.
Everything around her is forces of the universe constantly shifting, silhouettes in red and layers of shadow, unnamable things just waiting to reach out and grab her.
Or to be grabbed by her. She doesn’t know which is worse.
ii.
By the time she’s sixteen it’s completely out of control. Everywhere she goes she creates chaos, and it’s never intentional. It’s never what she wants.
Nothing is what she wants.
There are voices in her head of things yet to come, things that exist beyond the warped layers of reality. Her dreams are always nightmares. Her thoughts are screams. She’s a walking storm of devastation that lashes out in surges, that swells and rises and crashes again and again like waves.
In the center there is her, frightened and helpless. Alone.
Daddy has given up. She can’t master this, and he can’t teach her, and it’s too dangerous to keep her around. He has important work to do - he can’t risk his enemies being able to find him because of his unpredictable, useless daughter.
In the middle of the night he takes her by the arm and leads her to the hospital. He knows the people there. Wanda doesn’t know them. She doesn’t want to stay here. She isn’t given a choice.
They hold her back when she tries to reach for her father, when she pleads with him as he walks away, saying “Daddy no, Daddy please, don’t go, don’t leave me!”
The walls are beginning to shake. But she’s just a slip of a girl. They pull her to the ground and stick a needle in her arm.
iii.
She spends the next two years sleeping.
Or not asleep - but not awake either. Never awake.
Everything is a haze, and blurry around the edges. The voices and the shadows and the real-not-real things are still there. They never really go away, which means she’s always nervous, but they can’t touch her when she’s like this either.
When she starts to wake up and her vision focuses and the lines come together jagged and angry and demanding, she shrieks and flails violently at everything around her. Ribbons of power lash out.
They say, “She’s too dangerous.”
So they fill her up with pills and little silver punctures until she falls asleep again. They try to never let her wake up.
Everything is gray and wrong, but at least it’s safe.
iv.
She spends most of her days with her head resting against the wall and in her dreams she’s floating while she never goes anywhere.
It’s all a cloud, she’s in a cloud, until one day she looks up and a lady is standing there. A pretty lady. A pretty lady who’s looking at Wanda and then who’s talking to the doctors and the doctors are talking back, and she’s having trouble understanding any of the words.
“Are you certain you have the proper resources and facilities to handle her? Her power levels are incredibly strong, and without the medications-”
“Yes, yes; you’ve made your reservations quite clear. Really, I think the fact that Professor Xavier sent me here should speak for itself. Believe me, my facility is far better suited to ‘handle’ someone with her abilities than yours obviously is.”
She twists her shoulders and flops over onto her back and lifts her chin to peer guilelessly up at the pretty lady.
The pretty lady smiles down at her, her eyes soft and reassuring, and so certain. “Hello, Wanda,” she says. “My name is Moira. I’m here to help you.”
v.
She spends the next years in Dr. MacTaggert - in Moira’s care. It takes a while for her to stop being sick because of the pills no longer in her system. It takes a while for her to get used to not sleeping all the time.
The world is strange and loud and bright, and she hasn’t had to deal with it since she was a teenager. But Moira lives on an island and in isolation. Things are much simpler there.
Moira isn’t special herself, but she’s worked all her life helping other special people. She runs painless tests on Wanda’s mind and body, and talks her down calmly when her powers flare up and she starts fires or tears things apart around her or unconsciously defies the laws of physics.
She never sees Moira upset, or afraid.
She is soothing and supportive, comforting and a little bit loving. Bit by bit she puts the pieces of her fragile charge back together until they resemble a young woman again. She is something like the mother that Wanda can no longer remember that she ever had.
Moira doesn’t yet understand how her powers work, but she is curious and oh-so patient. And Wanda is in no hurry to learn.
Many years go by.
She passes the time quietly re-teaching herself how to use silverware and read books, or sitting by a window soaking up the sunshine, staring at the blue sky above.
vi.
Moira talks to many people all over the world, for many different reasons.
Some of them are other scientists, other doctors like her. Some of them are colleagues, or friends. Some are more than friends (Professor Xavier, or ‘Charles’, is clearly one of those. But Wanda can keep a secret. Wanda never tells).
Many of them have one crucial thing in common: they want to help people who need it.
There is a man named Dr. Samson, and he wants nothing more than to help very specific type of people: people who are special, but also lost inside their own minds. People who are sick there, hurt, or just very, very confused.
In the middle of 2010 there are a flurry of communications between him and Moira, emails and phone calls back and forth. They’re dotted with phrases like “investors” and “building permit” and “private funding”.
The end result is that Moira is moving her research, and leaving her island for a little while - and Wanda is too.
Wanda is going to a new home.
vii.
The Mayfair Institute is advertised as a private psychiatric clinic and recovery center. It is located in the rolling green, woodsy hills of Maine, where the landscape is quite pretty and there is no one around for miles. That hidden isolation is not an accident.
It’s very hard to get to the institute unless you know what you’re looking for. There aren’t many signs. The website has no directions and you need to call first to make an appointment. The buildings are all clean white paint and new glass. The staff that works there rarely leaves, and when they do they’re very discreet.
The locals assume it must be a rehab for the wealthy and avert their eyes, losing interest.
The buildings that make up the compound look surprisingly small, but that’s only because most of the facility is actually underground.
Wanda has her own room with a bed and a small dresser and a sunlamp. She has to ask permission to go to another room, to use the bathroom or take a shower.
She wears soft slippers and a bathrobe over pale-colored pajamas. She takes exactly five pills a day and all of them are for anxiety. She has private sessions with Moira and Dr. Samson separately, where they work on her “issues” from both ends.
She eats three meals at regular times in the cafeteria. In the morning she has Tai Chi. In the evening she watches television. In the afternoon she has a group therapy session, where she sits between a girl who has both anorexia and pyrokinesis, and a man with schizophrenia and trouble staying on his meds ever since he gained odd abilities from an industrial accident.
In the afternoon she also has art therapy, which is maybe her favorite part of the day. She’s classified as ‘Tier 2’ because they aren’t sure if she should be allowed sharp things yet. She fingerpaints and makes things out of soft molding clay.
Her days are peaceful and one blends into the next. Her powers still make her nervous; the voices and strange creatures are still there. Occasionally there are incidents, but at least they’re contained.
She takes her pills and she eats applesauce with a spoon and carrots with a fork and she watches sitcoms or old movies in black and white and she draws strange, swirling patterns with bright splashes of color that don’t look like anything but for some reason make her feel better.
Wanda doesn’t really care if she ever gets to leave here. It doesn’t feel important. What could she do, anyway?
viii.
Dr. Samson is a nice man who knows a lot about people whose minds don’t work just right.
At first she’s intimidated by him, mostly because he reminds her of the doctors at that first hospital; the ones that didn’t try to help her, that just wanted to keep her locked away. But he shows her very quickly that he is nothing like that.
He spends the first few visits sitting on the floor by her, a safe distance away, talking softly and asking her questions about herself and how her day was.
After two weeks he tells Wanda that it’s his professional assessment that she has anxiety issues, emotional problems and a mild dissociative disorder. He also tells her none of that matters.
“You don’t have to think about things in terms of labels or a checklist, Wanda, and that’s how I try not to see my patients. I don’t want you to focus on what you ‘have’ or what you have to do to get rid of it. You should just be focusing on trying to get yourself well.”
“What does that mean,” she asks. “What will it be like when I’m ‘well’?”
He frowns a gentle, thinking frown and shrugs with his hands and says, “It will mean you’ll be able to interact with the normal world, and other people, and it will feel more or less natural to you. It won’t be a physical or emotional strain. You won’t constantly be overwhelmed, or worried you’re going to somehow mess up.”
Wanda can’t imagine ever being like that. She hugs her knees together and kneads her shirt hem in her hands and looks down, and after a moment tells him so.
He smiles and tells her that she doesn’t have to imagine it. She just has to be willing to trust him to lead her on the baby steps to take her there.
Wanda has one hour-long session with Dr. Samson every day of the week. Sometimes he lets her mumble on about any random thing she wants to talk about; sometimes he asks her hard and probing questions about her family, thoughts, and feelings. It depends on what kind of day it is, what she has the strength for.
She never really knows what she has the strength for, herself. But somehow Dr. Samson always does.
ix.
Moira and Dr. Samson and all the other mostly nice people at the Institute have been able to do a lot for her. But the finer points of how, exactly, her powers work remain a mystery.
From her tests Moira has determined what she’s specifically able to do is alter probability. If the probability of it raining is very low, Wanda can instead make it high, and then it rains. But it becomes much more, to the point where she can alter reality itself. That’s why everything around her looks abnormal. It’s because she can see the prospective realities all at once.
Her emotions and stress levels can cause the amount of potential energy she has in her body to spike. Dr. Samson works on talking her through her worse days and her panic attacks. He teaches her meditations and exercises she can do to calm herself down. It takes practice and effort, but she can keep the power contained.
But even with Moira’s research and Dr. Samson’s coaching, neither of them can guide her in learning all she has inside of her. They can’t really begin to know, because neither of them has firsthand experience with this.
They can listen to how she feels all they like. They can’t tell her what to do. No one can.
Until one day they say to her: “Wanda, there is someone very special here to see you.”
x.
The man that visits her in her room is tall. And pale. He has dark black hair, and green eyes that give her shivers to look too far into, and when he smiles there’s something…funny about the shape of his mouth. He’s almost more pretty than handsome, the lines of his face more finely formed than anything she could scrape out of clay with her awkward, trembling hands.
And there is something else about him. A presence. Heavy, and charged like lightning: it takes her breath away.
The area around him swims, he is teeming with so much power. Wanda is glad she’s already on the floor or else she would be weak in the knees.
She sits with her back in a corner and loosely hugs her legs, looking up at him. He looks back down at her searchingly, and smiles.
“Hello,” he greets her, and doesn’t seem to care that Wanda can’t say a thing. “So you’re the one they wished for me to have a look at. Wanda Maximoff,” her full name rolls off his tongue carefully; “you’re much more than what I had prepared for, what I’d imagined.”
He takes slow steps closer toward her. Not like he’s trying not to frighten her, but like he’s trying to drink her in.
The closer he gets, the more she becomes hypnotized. The energy off the two of them reaches out like desperate hands for one another, dancing together. She’s never experienced this before.
She’s met other mutants. She’s never met anyone like her.
“Who are you?” she asks in timid wonder.
“My name is Loki.” He kneels, close enough she can feel his breath, which is cool and sweet. (Moira and Dr. Samson watch from the open door. They might as well be on another planet.) “Son of Odin, prince of Asgard.”
The titles mean nothing to her but are said so regally that for a moment she can pretend that they do.
He stares at her with his green, green eyes, so terrible and beautiful, and reaches out to touch her face with the very tips of his fingers.
“So lovely,” he says. “So majestic.” He ghosts a caress over her cheek. “You have such power, Wanda. I’m here to teach you how to use it. Let me show you the way.
“Let me teach you how to use your magic.”
xi.
Loki’s visits aren’t like Moira’s, or Dr. Samson’s. They come very irregularly. Sometimes they are days apart, sometimes weeks.
But whenever they do come, they stretch on and on, often for nearly an entire day.
Loki says that her power - her ‘chaos magic’, he calls it - is out of balance. That she has learned to handle it all the wrong ways, suppressing it when she should be channeling it, fearing it when it should be embraced.
It is the best part of her, he argues. It is innate; it is her heart, her very soul. And she has let it grow unchecked, cowering around it and trying to force it through, when instead she and her power should be as one.
These are all things that Loki says. They sound lovely and amazing when they come from his lips, but Wanda isn’t sure she can believe any of it. The ‘her’ he describes is somebody she doesn’t know how to be.
She has never been in charge of anything. Let alone taken the reins of something so powerful for herself.
She tries to find a polite way to tell Loki that he’s wrong. That he must have made some mistake.
But somehow Loki has her paintings from art therapy in his hands. He spreads them out on the floor in front of her, and points to the squiggles and lines.
“Look,” he says. “Look. Do you know what these are? Even if you don’t realize it, a part of you already does.” His fingers trace briefly a green boxy-looking thing, a violet many-pointed star, a twisting orange oval. “These are runes, symbols of ancient sorcery.” His gaze is fevered as it hovers on her. “Some study for centuries to learn them, but you pluck them out of thin air. They come to you without trying, as easy as a dream.”
“Dreaming is anything but easy,” she finds herself whispering, throat dry, feeling shell-shocked.
Loki lifts his chin up further and looks at her from a different angle.
“No,” he agrees. “Learning to walk the many harrowed paths betwixt dreams, and shadows, and all the in-betweens, is very, very hard. It can take time. And effort. And at times, even, pain.”
Spontaneously he takes her hand in his, squeezing their palms against each other, fingers lacing tight.
In the space where real meets not-real above their hands, a spark of red and a spark of green strike each other.
Green and red are complimentary colors. Together they should make brown. But they don’t. Instead they retain their shades, meet one another, and bounce off. Wanda is mesmerized.
“But oh,” Loki breathes, “what wonders unfold before you, when you walk that path.”
xii.
“One step at a time,” is one of the first things Loki tells her. Another one is “Trust me.”
She has heard this all before.
But when Loki says it, she believes him. Something in her is drawn to him, wants to let him lead her wherever he will. She somehow feels, without any reservation, that it is going to be worth it.
So she trusts Loki, implicitly. She lets him become her teacher, her mentor. She lets him open her up to a whole new world of possibilities.
And it is hard. At times, as he takes her further and further, it even becomes dangerous.
But every day the swirling, changing multifaceted world around her makes more and more sense. Little by little, it stops being frightening, and even starts to be beautiful.
“You can see and hear things that most can never even imagine, Wanda,” Loki says. “Do not squander that. Look. Listen.”
She looks and she listens, and drinks in every far off voice, every blinding beam of light, and savors it.
xiii.
“Where your eye and your mind goes, your power will follow. Remember it is yours to master, not the other way around. Here, let me show you.”
Loki’s chest is to her back, shoulders lined up best as they can accounting for height differences. He covers her hand with his own and spreads his fingers, gently molding hers to match.
“Imagine you hold a knife in your hand. When you call on your magic, trace it along the edge of the blade, charging it. And then throw it.” He raises his arm; hers moves seamlessly. His eyes pick a random spot on the wall. “Aim for your target.”
He pulls just enough away so that the force behind the gesture is all Wanda’s own. She flicks her wrist and there it is, a burst of brilliant crimson. It snaps away from her fingertips and hits the spot.
Reality warps and suddenly, where there was nothing, the air is broken by the delicate wing-beatings of a few confused butterflies. Wanda laughs, delighted.
“At least that result was better than the last time,” Loki comments wryly.
Spinning the wheel of probability and potential at random, Wanda was somehow able to turn an ordinary sofa into an enraged charging rhino. Her face flushes at the memory and she looks down at her toes, abashed.
Loki catches her chin with crooked fingers and coaxes her up into meeting his eyes. “Not your fault. You’re still learning. But eventually, you will be able to do more than rely on chance and chaos.” His eyes are intense and serious. “You must be ready to bend and shape everything around you to your will.”
The idea of that ever being possible is staggering.
But first, Wanda thinks, she would probably have to uncover what her ‘will’ even is.
Loki is aware of this. More than once he has smiled at her, softly and crooked, and told her how lucky she is he didn’t find her only years before.
“My designs were quite different then. I would still teach you, but only with a purpose. I would’ve gladly made a puppet out of you. A pawn.”
She knows better than to tell him that doesn’t sound so bad.
xiv.
She thinks she is probably in love with Loki. But not in a way he should be worried about.
She knows that he has someone. He has mentioned her (perhaps on purpose, perhaps not) to Wanda once or twice. His love is already spoken for.
Besides, Wanda is weak and frail. Her words get stuck in her throat, when they even come at all, and she’s intimidated sometimes by the prospect of something so simple as turning a knob and walking through a door. If Loki smiles when he looks at her sometimes it’s because of her potential, and she hasn’t lived up to that yet.
People are afraid to get near her because of her emotional instability, her history of being abandoned. It makes her want to cling to everyone and make them all dear to her, to cherish every small thing as important and never let them go.
But no, she doesn’t feel the way towards Loki she imagines she would toward a lover. She loves him as someone who sees her in a way that nobody else does, as an inspiration, as a protector and a teacher and a guide.
He is bigger than her, awe-inspiring. He is her messiah. He knows the most intimate part of her like the shape of his hand: the mystic power that is her very soul.
She would never even try to kiss Loki. But if she fell, she would trust him blindly, unthinkingly, to catch her, no matter how far she tumbled into the dark.
xv.
And so when Loki says to her one day, all of a sudden, “Wanda, I’d like you to come somewhere with me,” it doesn’t matter why he asks.
It doesn’t matter that she hasn’t left Mayfair since the day its doors opened. It doesn’t matter that she can’t remember the last time she went for a walk by herself outside. It doesn’t matter that she hasn’t been anywhere, anywhere at all, except one hospital or research facility or another, since she was sixteen years old.
She doesn’t ask where Loki wants to take her or why he wants her there. She figures he’ll tell her once she needs to know.
All that matters is Loki is asking.
(And maybe, a little, that both Moira and Dr. Samson reluctantly say it’s okay.)
And so Wanda goes.
xvi.
Magic is less mentally exhausting than the outside world. She understands the former, intuitively. She looks on with calm inquisitiveness as Loki leads her by the hand through one of his hidden pathways, crossing the distance between here and there like folding two points together on a map.
At the other end, she blinks, disoriented. The room is big and open with no windows, bright with harsh lights. There are mats on the floor and a boxing ring. Weights and other equipment dot the floor. The air has the stale smell of bleach and old sweat.
It is so real, so normal. It’s disquieting.
She pokes one of the leather bags hanging from the ceiling with her finger and watches it sway on its chain.
Loki clears his throat. She turns her head, realizes there’s a man she didn’t notice before. Blond, well-muscled, he sits on a wooden bench with his body leaning forward, shoulders hunched, damp hair over his eyes.
Hearing Loki the man looks up at them. He has a strong, clean face that seems perpetually young, but there is a weight of pain and much older sadness in his clear blue eyes.
He gets to his feet and comes toward them, exchanging a nod with Loki. “So, this is the one you were telling me about?”
“Yes.” Loki puts a hand on her shoulder. “This is the incomparably gifted Wanda Maximoff. Wanda, this is Steven Rogers.” A smile briefly marks his face. “You may better know him as Captain America.”
When the captain reaches out his hand for her to shake, Wanda takes it quickly so as to hide her trembling.
“No doubt you’re aware of the group he belongs to, also,” Loki continues, after. “The Avengers.”
“Yes,” she manages to say.
“There have been some…recent losses. I’m afraid the team has suffered.” Loki’s words are grave. “Unfortunately, the threat they serve to counter has grown anything but weakened.”
Captain America makes a terse sound and turns away, shuddering. “SHIELD wants us to continue on. But if we’re going to do so, we need to rebuild the team from scratch.”
His voice is heavy with despondency as he stares at the floor.
“Barton’s dead…Banner has gone MIA. Agent Romanoff’s under deep cover and can’t be reached. Tony is in a coma-”
“Steve.” Loki cuts him off with sympathy. There’s pause during which the other man snaps out of his reverie and looks to him, and Loki touches him, voice soft. “I know.”
He leans on Loki for a moment, as Wanda hangs where she is, watching; the awkward silent spectator. “Sorry. It’s just-”
“This has been a hard time for you,” Loki finishes, understanding. “Though I can do nothing to ease the pain, I will do what I can to help.” He looks meaningfully to Wanda and after a few seconds the captain’s gaze follows.
He stands tall again, coming back to himself as he addresses her.
“So, how about it, Ms. Maximoff?” he asks. “Would you like to become an Avenger?”
xvii.
Wanda is not a hero. She’s not a fighter. She’s not a master of incomparable power, she’s only a vessel. She’s a recluse, a mental patient, a damaged girl who can barely take care of herself.
She doesn’t know why Loki, why anyone thinks she can do this.
She can’t.
“Wouldn’t you like to give your powers the chance to run free, to truly use them? To let yourself finally see what you’re capable of?”
Yes, she thinks, uncertain, begrudging. But…
“Wouldn’t you like to put your gifts to good use?” Loki continues, knowing he already half-has her. “To use them to help others?”
“I don’t know what difference I would make,” she protests. “I would only get in the way.”
Loki gives an odd grin. Like she’s said something funny.
“Believe me, you would not.”
When she stays silent, unconvinced, he continues more soberly, “Every hand that can be lent is needed. The Avengers need all the help they can get.”
Finally, in the end she decides to give in and give it a try. If only to see if she can manage to do more good than harm.
xviii.
Loki’s ways will part with hers from here on out. But before she goes, he gives her one last present.
He hands her a bundle covered in soft cloth, which she unwraps to find gleaming metal and spools of rich fabric. The breastplate is light, silver, molded to protect her torso in shapes faintly reminiscent of Loki’s gear. There are boots and gloves, a small headpiece, and wisps of a train that will fall from her shoulders when she stands, billowing dramatically without hampering her movement. Everything is colored in shades of dark purple and vibrant bright crimson, the red that matches the hue of her own magic.
“A mage’s armor,” Loki states, “forged by the finest hands on Asgard. A symbol of power, and prominence. You deserve nothing less.”
She touches the armor, delicately. Her fingers run along the seams of the leather gloves.
The outfit makes her feel at last like she is truly a magic user, a sorceress.
The first time she’s wearing it will be on her first mission. A SHIELD agent holding a clipboard will come up to her and ask what she’d like her codename to be - apparently it’s needed for the official record.
She’ll look away at her reflection in the nearest metallic wall.
She doesn’t see a slender, weak-kneed girl with pale skin and unruly auburn hair. She sees a composed woman surrounded by cascading waves of red.
“Scarlet Witch,” she says.
xix.
The new lineup of the Avengers is unruly, far from seasoned. They lack experience, have never fought together, and some of them are hardly friends. It’s difficult for them to get along, let alone stand side by side on the battlefield.
But the original Avengers began much the same way.
They have their trials. Their baptism by fire. And gradually there comes that shift. They go from being new recruits to warriors, from a ragtag mob to a team.
And the Scarlet Witch grows and grows in skill, and in confidence.
She relies on her teammates to help her. And they trust her to support them right back, are in awe of her powers, and have faith in her ability to control them.
Together they fight terrorists, supervillains, monsters. Together they save people. Together, they change the world.
Another day finds her knee-deep in rubble, gunfire and explosions all around, the others scattered out around her. Captain America uses his shield to guard a downed Namor and Thor whips his hammer around to send an attacker flying.
She stands her ground. Looks for any opening where she can be of use.
A wave of her hand and a fire hydrant dissolves, the uncovered burst of water toppling an enemy from his feet. Another series of gestures and the concrete ripples, warps into quicksand, sucking a careless individual under.
As Ms. Marvel throws one would-be opponent away from her overhand, using his weight to bowl a set of men down, someone else tries to sneak up behind her.
Wanda sends a blast of magic into the man’s face which becomes a thick cloud of mosquitos, and he staggers and falls backward on the ground, coughing, blinded.
Carol turned to see what happened and shoots her a bright smile, giving a salute before she flies away.
“Thanks, Wanda!” She winks.
“Look out,” someone yells, and Wanda spins in time to see an armored assailant reaching toward her. She makes a fist, shoving it into his chest. She has no time for finesse so she casts a ‘hex bolt’, one of her small bursts of random chaos magic. The spark of red fills her palm and shoots through her fingertips.
The force of the blow sends the man flying back, and as he lands, dazed, he’s quickly pinned by the tendrils of vines creeping around him out of nowhere.
The end of the battle comes not long after.
Like most others, it sees them victorious. This is a way of life for this team. This is what they do.
But all good things must come to an end. The team line-up changes: some new names leave. Some old ones come back.
Wanda stays. This is her home now. This is where she belongs.
xx.
Captain America is the first to accept Wanda, unthinkingly, as an Avenger.
He’s a good leader, Steve Rogers is. He gives confident orders in the field and steadying words of quiet reassurance off it. He looks at Wanda in a way that says he believes in her. He makes her believe in herself.
He trains her in hand-to-hand combat when she decides to learn how to fight. He’s honest with her, and never too easy. They spent hours alone together practicing, exchanging blows as he corrects her form, bodies moving close and sometimes locked together.
Steve is handsome. He has brilliant eyes and a soft, shy smile. He talks about history. He likes art. He smells good. Wanda watches the way his clothes slide against his skin, how his muscles tense and gleam as he works out, and bites her lip. She daydreams, sometimes.
But she never says a word.
Ms. Marvel is the first to take on Wanda, eagerly, as a friend.
She’s an amazing individual, Carol Danvers is. She follows orders, doesn’t seek glory, but she is so strong, and so proud. She soars into battle in a streak of gold with a grin, and it’s all Wanda can do to gaze on, awed and inspired.
She clucks her tongue at Wanda, teasingly, when she sees her lingering in shadows or hiding behind doors. Drags her by the hand, encourages her to be more outgoing, more social. They can talk for hours.
Carol is beautiful. She has flowing yellow hair and a dazzling, confident smile. She likes dancing, and reading magazines, and loves serving her country, and is unashamed of her body. Wanda leans into her hugs and watches her move graceful as a deer when she runs. There is a warm flutter in her breast.
But she never says a word about this, either.
She nurses her treasured feelings, alone and secret, and locks them away in her heart. Safe. Where they’ll never be in the way.
xxi.
She resigned herself to never having a lover, but she longs for a family.
A real family: of flesh and blood, life and birth. She wants it, maybe more than she’s ever wanted anything else.
She can’t explain it. She never talks about it. But she sees the SHIELD agents with their families, sees pictures of babies on the TV, and thinks, I want that to be mine. When she’s alone she closes her eyes and thinks about having children.
Until like many things she thinks about hard and long enough, it becomes so.
She isn’t surprised when a month later Loki comes for her.
He lets himself inside; walks in, silently, to find her sitting on the floor of the between two cribs. She watches her babies sleep.
“Wanda,” Loki’s voice contains shocked, repressed horror, “what have you done?”
She doesn’t look at him. She gets up. Leans over to smooth the errant locks of one son’s hair.
“I wanted to have children,” she tells him, simple. “So I did.”
He comes closer. She can feel him looking past her, at the contents of the cribs. She doesn’t dare turn to see what might be on his face.
“You created them,” he insists. “Out of nothing. You made life where none should exist. It should be impossible.”
He moves again until he is directly next to her.
“Or if not, it means that they should be abominations.”
“They are my children.” Voice small, she folds one hand over the other. “My sons. My little boys.”
She knows it. They never grew within her, they just were one day, but she feels a connection as deep and sure as she has never felt anything else. She looks on them and feels that love in her heart and knows they are hers.
And she would do anything, anything to keep them safe.
Fear spikes through her and she turns to Loki, desperate. “You have to help me,” she pleads, calling on their bond of these past few years. She squeezes his hand as she feels tears start to come. “Please.”
She’s known since the first moment it wouldn’t last. That there’d be a reckoning.
She couldn’t do something of this magnitude and not have any consequences.
Loki looks at her a moment, impassive, then past her again. Her nearest boy is waking and starting to fuss. Loki hesitates then reaches, lifting him in his arms with practiced care. He has children of his own, after all.
“His name is William,” she says, stilted. “But it’s ‘Billy’ for short. The other one is Thomas, or Tommy.”
Loki holds Billy upright, supporting the small head in his palm, examining his face. “A fine-looking boy,” he observes. “I think I sense future power in him.”
She grips onto Loki’s forearm. “Help me. They must be kept safe.” She shakes her head. “I won’t lose them. I won’t let that happen.”
Loki meets her gaze at last, frowning. Anxiety creases the area between his eyes.
“You caused a massive disturbance in this world’s field of mystic energy when you did this. It could be felt for miles around. It attracted the interest of more than a few parties.”
Her voice is hollow, dry. “Loki…”
“I’ve done what I can to cover for you. I told Dr. Strange it was my doing, the unintentional side effect of one of my ‘experiments’. And I asked Victor von Doom to leave it alone, as a personal favor to me.” He shakes his head in turn. “But this can’t last. It won’t be long before more grow curious, before someone comes looking. And when they find these children…”
Her babies will be taken. Feared, viewed as a potential danger, locked up to be studied.
“Please,” she asks yet again, “there must be something you can do.”
He shifts Billy in his arms, rocking him. Then he sets him back down. He turns to speak to Wanda’s entreating gaze.
“There is,” he tells her. “I can take the infants away. Give them to other families, hide all traces of them.” His face is solemn. “They would not be with you, but they would have safe, happy childhoods.”
She turns her back, arms hanging limply. The ground feels twisted under her feet.
“One day, eventually, you would be reunited. When it’s been long enough that any danger one could’ve supposed they’d pose has passed.” He clasps her upper arm. “But until then…Wanda, you know if left in your care, there will be too many who worry about what their existence could mean. They will never know peace.”
“I know,” she agrees in a mumble, trying not to sob.
She doesn’t dare ask how long it will take. She can’t stand to hear such an answer - one she knows he’d give, if she asked.
With anyone else there’d be denial. But this is Loki. What recourse does she have but to admit his wisdom? To yield to what in the sour pit of her stomach she already knows is the truth.
She must give up Billy and Tommy, for their own good.
Somehow she can’t feel wronged for it. Isn’t it way the universe is, after all? In everything there must be balance.
“No one can know. They must be concealed entirely. It must be like they never existed. No one can know,” he repeats, emphatically, “including you.”
She breathes in with a wet sniffle and doesn’t answer. Her eyes are frantic with misery. But of course - among those who will be looking are those trained to spot a liar, not to mention mind-readers, telepaths.
And she can’t tell anyone what she doesn’t remember.
Behind her back she can feel Loki eyeing the cribs again. “Promise me,” she demands of him, not turning around, “you’ll keep an eye on them. If I can’t guard them myself, I need you to see that they stay safe.”
“They will.” His response is emphatic. And it sounds like as he says it, best as he can, he is apologizing to her. “From a distance I will watch, and I swear to you that they will want for nothing.”
She nods and in doing so lets loose a broken sob. Gently she drops to her knees.
Loki crouches beside her, stroking back the tresses around her face, cupping the sides of her temple as she cries into her hands.
She tells herself that once the deed is done her loss won’t hurt anymore.
“Thank you,” the words come faltering, muffled, “for being so good to me. For using your power to help me…”
Loki’s eyes are wide when she lifts her head toward his.
“Wanda,” he begins slowly, “I have the experience of thousands of years, and secrets gained from walking countless worlds. But…you are far more powerful than I. I have skill; you tap into a strength that I will probably never be able to possess.”
He holds her face between his hands and his fingers start to warm with magic.
“And I am truly sorry you won’t remember this.”
xxii.
The Scarlet Witch is a superhero. She’s a household name. There are stories of her on the news nearly every month. There are many pictures of her on the internet. She has an action figure.
So after over a decade of being kept hidden, it’s be no surprise when that comes to an end.
She’s alone on the rooftop garden of Avengers Tower when she senses, hears sudden movement beside her. She has a flickering moment of alarm, then relaxes.
She doesn’t have to look. She doesn’t ready a defense. She doesn’t scream.
And she isn’t amazed that the person she knows stands next to her could get in undetected, either.
She knows he can move faster than even most advanced security systems can see.
“Hey there, Sis.”
“Hello Pietro.” She turns slow, unbothered, looking over her shoulder. “It’s been a long, long time.”
Her twin raises an eyebrow at her, as sardonic as she remembers without him having to say a word. He’s wearing a sleek armored uniform silver as his hair. He’s grown tall, muscled - but still skinny. Quicksilver. Her brother.
When they were young, they were close as two people could be. Even though they were both little he always said it was his job to protect her. But she can’t remember if he even tried to stop their father from taking her away.
She wonders if he thought through the years about where she was, what she was doing, the way she occasionally thought about him.
“You can sure say that again,” he quips. “What’s the matter - no hug?”
She turns fully to face him. She’s changed out of half her costume, but her arms are still sheathed in her scarlet gloves. Her hands curl into fists; Pietro fidgets like he’s nervous. There’s a cloth bandage around her shoulder. The wind is blowing her hair to her left side.
She doesn’t like to play games. She never has.
“What are you doing here, Pietro?”
He puts his hands on his hips and stands his ground. “What am I doing here?” he repeats in a lazy drawl, mocking. “What are you? Fighting alongside these flat-scans; letting them act like they could ever accept you-”
“They have accepted me,” she returns, prim.
“Sure they have. Because you’re useful.” He plays roguishly with his hair. “And because they’d rather have you on their side, putting your scary powers to use for them, than having to fight you.”
She doesn’t let herself sigh. “And why are you talking to me?” is her pointed response.
Pietro’s expression falls.
“I did think about you a lot, you know,” he insists. “And I’ve wanted to come find you almost every day, ever since we realized where you were.”
Her voice is uncompromising as she states what they both know.
“But you’re here because of Daddy. Because it’s what he told you to do. He wants you to convince me to come on your side.” Raised to be a soldier in an army fighting for mutantkind - following the orders of that intimidating man not just out of fear, but because of not knowing how not to obey him, how to do anything else.
She still remembers what that was like. Sometimes, she can almost feel nostalgic for it.
Pietro argues, “You belong with us. We’re your people, Wanda; your kind. If you joined the Brotherhood-”
“The Brotherhood is a terrorism group.” She hasn’t come so far to fall for this now.
He looks sullen, almost angry. “Don’t you think you should be with your family?” he demands.
She’s silent.
Yes, part of her thinks - she does. Her father and brother are all that’s left of a life she had once, long ago. In her heart a little girl named Wanda Maximoff whose mother just died wants to go running back to them. Wants to be wrapped up and tucked in, safe.
But does Daddy want her back because she’s his daughter, or because of her powers?
As long as she can’t be sure of that - and knowing the man that is her father, she thinks she can never be sure - her place isn’t with them.
“You should go,” she tells her brother gently.
He starts to reach for her. His expression turns more tragic. She knows he isn’t faking; Daddy doesn’t believe in that.
“Come on. Wanda-”
“Don’t make me ask you to leave.”
The words come out maybe cooler than she intended. Pietro flinches in surprise.
He tilts his chin, eyes aloof, frowning. He always acted like nothing ever bothered him. Right now, he doesn’t want to seem like he’s actually intimidated by her.
But they both know she could throw him off the roof, if she wanted. Probably with a twitch of her pinkie.
“This isn’t over,” he declares.
No. Probably not. And this is why Moira felt more confident sending her to the Avengers instead of the X-Men: because no one was sure how, all considered, she would handle having to face the Brotherhood.
But it seems like they have to go up against everyone, eventually. Maybe it’s only a matter of time.
Scarlet Witch turns her back on her brother. She folds her arms, keeps her head up, and breathes steadily as she waits for him to go away.
“You and Daddy can keep fighting for mutants,” she says. “I’m going to fight for everybody.”
xxiii.
When she was little the world was a scary place - bigger than her, stronger than her; and all she knew was her mother was dead, and she and her brother belonged together, and to believe whatever her father told her.
For years everything was power around her, nightmares, shadows, threatening to swallow her whole.
Lost and alone. Insane. Damaged. Unwanted.
But she knows different, now. She knows what can be done. What she can do.
There is beauty in the madness, strength in the chaos. Her strength. Her beauty. Her magic.
And she’s not afraid anymore.
She can change the world - make friends, intimidate enemies, share her feelings, bring her thoughts to life. She can make something out of nothing.
All she has to do is try, is focus. Ruby red tendrils of energy swirl around her, lifting her up, and no law, no force can push her back, can hold her down. Nothing can stop her if she won’t let it.
Not even gravity.
Wanda shakes her hair and lifts her arms, kicks up her heels and cranes her head toward the sky. Closes her eyes and threads through the reality around her, twists and bends it and remakes it as she will.
And just like that, up she goes. Higher and higher into the air.
She’s flying, rising, gliding on the wind. She’s a long way up and moving through the air, among the clouds. Her eyes open again and she smiles.
She’s soaring, and leaving everything else on the ground far below.