narrative :: just when i was done believing.
This is the beginning of the price that she pays.
Once in a while, with increasing frequency, there are headaches. Sharp, screaming, light-sensitive headaches, ones she has never spoken of to anyone and never will until she's caught, which is probably an inevitability. They start at her temples and spread, slowly, leaving her a quiet, barely-breathing tangle of clothes and limbs in a tall bed with white sheets and dark wooden floors beneath it. Almost no other furniture occupies the room, leaving it empty-looking and, to its inhabitant, empty-feeling, which is what she thinks is right. The window is open, as are the curtains, and outside she can hear the far-off sound of people talking. She doesn't cry, even though she might have, before, from the sheer persistence of her powers combating her weakening mental shields. It doesn't hurt as badly as some other things, like dying. Or like childbirth, in one memory she'd created for herself, and don't women usually forget how that feels? Don't they block it out? Isn't that another sign that she couldn't get it quite right?
Thinking like that just makes her head hurt worse, and she breathes out.
It wasn't just one day, M Day, despite its moniker. It was her childhood's end, the long wasteland between an old home and a new one, and it was the beginning of her adulthood as a pawn to her own father, and it was when she lost the boys who had never been there in the first place. It was sacrificing herself to stop Onslaught, and it was never, ever cracking, knowing that she had a job to do and when everything fell apart, she never would. It was years fighting every day for Tony and Clint's respect and feeling certain they didn't believe she could lead, and it was watching the Vision become unrecognizable regardless of whose thought patterns he had, someone who looked straight through her. M Day was just the moment the dam broke. Decimation was when she took every puzzle piece Chthon and the world had handed to her, threw them all in the air, and walked away, saying: why would anyone choose this? People hate mutants, and no matter where they went, no matter what side they chose, they were forced into political game-playing. Objects. Monsters. Bad luck. Why?
Why did she think that her choice would be theirs?
Where did that blindness come from? That selfishness? It's a part of everyone, Wanda knows, but the sheer projection involved... it's easy to look back and cringe now, of course. Alone, cradled in sheets like a bird with broken wings, her spine twisted to align with the wall. To her own eye, she looks like she's hiding from something. Maybe she is, but the only face she's found that really blames her is her own, and there is no one else here. Even Tony hadn't hated her, God help him. They were more alike than he'd probably ever admit, staring at the wreckage of their decisions and wondering where everyone had gone.
Am I a coward...for not wanting to kill myself? Even though I know I should?
She's brave enough now.
It yields another question: why is she still alive?
Maybe the reasons started in that City, and are only growing here. It's a possibility. Or, with this woman, dressed in scarlet even today: a probability.
She closes her eyes tightly, and time slips, leaving her feeling weightless in the most disconcerting way. It's the sense of suddenly falling without movement, but rather than flinching away, Wanda just lets herself go. When she opens her eyes again it's nearly black and nearly silent outside her window, something approximating serene. The darkness is soothing, and the pounding in her skull is gone. It's an hour before dawn, according to the clock.
"Okay," Wanda says, quietly, to herself (and she is listening), "Time to get up."
She makes the bed, and she tucks the sheets back into place, and she leaves the window open when she goes away again.