“What the fuck?” I murmured softly, looking up at the ethereal colours lighting up the night sky.

“Is that… the Aurora Borealis?” asked Pietro.

“We’re in Australia,” I said, unable to tear my eyes away from the sight. “But this is… we’re too far north, aren’t we? For the Aurora Australis? Is it even the right time of year?”

“You tell me.”

I didn’t really know what to say to that, so we stood silently for a few moments, mesmerised by the weaving greens, reds and purples. Though I was from Australia in my original life, I’d never actually seen the southern lights before. It was, quite frankly, one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.

We were in the middle of nowhere, really. A random stretch of road in rural New South Wales, a couple of dozen kilometres outside of Dubbo. I’d wanted to have a few ‘remote’ places up my sleeve to use as safe spots to portal to, so I’d picked a couple at random to memorise on Google Street View. The pictures online had just been an empty length of highway surrounded by sparse bushland. I hadn’t been expecting this at all. It was… auspicious.

The air was crisp and cold and I shivered, pulling my leather jacket closer around myself. It was more of a ‘fashion’ jacket than one designed to keep its wearer particularly warm, but it helped a little. Pietro looked over, seemingly less bothered by the temperature—I suspected that he ran a bit hotter than a normal person thanks to his power. “Cold?” he asked, smiling slightly when I nodded in response. “Why are we here? We don’t exactly have any camping gear.”

“We won’t stay long. I just wanted somewhere we wouldn’t be interrupted,” I said, gesturing with a hand to manipulate the wisps of chaos magic around me. The vibranium spears I’d stolen spread out above us, rotating in the air until their points faced downward, then stabbed down into the earth in a rough circle. Sitting down in the middle of the area I’d marked out, I took a deep breath to try to settle my nerves. “Okay, so, I need to talk you through this,” I said, patting the ground beside me.

“Talk me through what?” Pietro asked cautiously, stepping over and sitting down where I’d indicated.

“I’m going to take the Heart-Shaped Herb. It’s going to look… upsetting. I’ll probably pass out while it works, I don’t know how long for. I might glow purple a bit, my veins’ll pop out. I might seize up a little. That sort of thing. Whatever happens, just make sure I don’t hurt myself or choke on my own tongue or something.”

Pietro’s eyes grew wider as I described the process. “Okay, yeah. That does sound upsetting. Are you sure this is safe?”

“I’m sure,” I lied.

In actual fact, this was a little bit of a gamble. I felt like the risk of it going wrong was low enough to make it worthwhile but, when it came right down to it, I had no idea how the Heart-Shaped Herb worked. In the original timeline, I’d only ever seen Wakandans take it. T’Chaka. Killmonger. Shuri. M’Baku and Nakia had been potential candidates as well, but that was all. It was entirely possible that there was a key bit of Wakandan genetics required that I just didn’t have, and it would poison me instead of enhancing me.

Not only that, but the Heart-Shaped Herb was originally a gift from the goddess Bast to the five tribes of Wakanda. I was pretty sure that Bast wasn’t active on Earth anymore—she wasn’t on the Ennead council with the other Egyptian gods that weren’t currently stuck in ushabti and was spending at least some of her time hanging out several galaxies away in Omnipotence City. There was no evidence that she would notice or even care that I’d stolen one of the herbs, but there was still a tiny risk that doing this would attract the wrong sort of attention from a goddess.

He nodded slowly, then paused and tilted his head. “Why—”

“—did we only take one?” I finished his question for him. “First, I don’t know if you can have it safely. You’re already physically enhanced, so your body might react unpredictably to it. Second, I have no idea how well they travel or store, and if we do end up deciding we want more, they’re just a portal away.”

He folded his arms and looked at me sceptically. “You don’t think it’s safe for me, but for you it’s fine?”

I waved a hand dismissively. “Probably. I think. I’ve already told you that what happened to us isn’t the same. My power is magical: supercharged, but still just something I was born with. Yours… honestly, I don’t know what yours is. A physical enhancement, but I still don’t know the how or why. Trying to stack physical enhancements willy-nilly is risky—that’s how you get Abominations.”

Pietro huffed, climbing back to his feet and starting to pace. “I don’t know, Wanda. I don’t like this.” After a few seconds, he walked over to one of the spears and pulled it out of the ground, hefting it experimentally to get a feel for its balance.

I paused, watching him carefully. I knew that Okoye—a baseline human—was capable of throwing one of those spears through a car, and I suddenly had an upsettingly vivid mental image of what would happen if Pietro, moving at super speed, threw one at Iron Man. I sent a strand of chaos magic over to him, telekinetically pulling it from his grip and planting in back in the dirt where it had been. “Mine,” I said firmly.

Pietro pulled a face, holding up his hands in mock surrender. After a moment, he dropped them to his sides and let out a long sigh. “I’m not going to be able to talk you out of this, am I?”

“Nope. I’m the woman in charge, remember?”

“I’m twelve minutes older than you, you know,” he said, shooting me a flat look.

I cupped a hand around my ear and looking at him quizzically, as though I couldn’t hear him. “Sorry, what was that? You’re twelve? I mean, yes, you act like it most of the time.”

Folding his arms, Pietro rolled his eyes and stepped slowly back over to me. “Ugh. Fine. What are you waiting for, then?”

“There’s… something else,” I said reluctantly. I was pretty sure I was better off telling him about this beforehand, just in case, but I was still worried about his reaction. “The way the Wakandans tell it, when you take the Heart-Shaped Herb, your spirit leaves your body temporarily and travels to the Ancestral Plane.”

“Okay…?” he said, a little nonplussed by my hesitance. “Well, you’ll be good at that, right? You do that sort of thing all the time.”

I smiled despite myself, looking down and away from him, trying not to let him see my expression. “The Ancestral Plane is where they believe you go when you die. You see important people from your past. Dead people.”

Pietro froze. He was quiet for a few moments before he spoke again, his voice subdued. “You think you’ll see our parents.”

“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. There was also a distinct possibility that I’d see people from my old life, and I had absolutely no idea if that would be weird or comforting. “I don’t even know if it’s real. It might just be hallucinations. They usually do a big spiritual ceremony and symbolically bury you in the ground when you take it, so it might just be that the herb sends you on a trip, your mind is primed to see those things, and so it does.”

“Or you might see our parents,” he repeated quietly.

“Or I might see our parents.” I honestly had no idea. I really hoped I wouldn’t, but I couldn’t tell Pietro that. Would they know I wasn’t actually Wanda? If they didn’t… it was hard enough lying to Pietro, could I lie to them, too? A pair of loving parents, given a second chance to see their daughter again after they had died? “Is there anything you want me to say if I do?”

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Pietro’s shoulders sagged and he let out a sigh. “I don’t… what am I even supposed to say to that? It’s been so long. Tell them we love them? Miss them? I don’t know what else there is.” He stepped over to drop back down on the ground next to me, then lay back and looking up at the sky, tucking his hands under the back of his head.

I looked at him a moment, the colours of the aurora reflected in his eyes, then joined him. We stayed there for a few minutes, watching the symphony of light playing out above us in silence. After a little while the cold started to get to me, so I sat back up and gestured, telekinetically retrieving a mortar and pestle I’d snagged on our way out of the City of the Dead. Pietro tilted his head slightly so he could watch as I dropped the Heart-Shaped Herb into the mortar and crushed it with a few brisk motions. I looked over at him. “This can work pretty quickly. I’ll need your help.”

Reluctantly, he sat up and took the mortar from me. I lay back down, taking a moment to shift my body from side to side a bit until I was as comfortable as I could probably get on the hard-packed earth and grass. Looking up at Pietro, I opened my mouth expectantly, like a small child waiting to be fed. The mortar had a small spout on one side and he put it between my lips, using his free hand to lift my head a bit so I didn’t choke on the thick, iridescent purple liquid as he tipped it into my mouth.

It felt weirdly like room temperature molten metal in my mouth, thick and bitterly metallic and, somehow, as I drank it, barely any seemed to even make it to my stomach. Instead, it was rapidly absorbed by the soft tissues of my mouth and throat—it clung to the inside of my mouth, almost like it was alive and actively trying to find its way into my bloodstream. It wasn’t enough to make me feel like I was choking, but it was still uncomfortable in a way that was difficult to describe.

Pietro laid my head back down on the grass and watched me closely, concern in his eyes. I stared past him, feeling lightheaded, my eyes drawn to the colours of the aurora swimming through the sky. My muscles started twitching and I winced, closing my eyes and focusing on working through whatever was happening to me. My breathing became erratic—it felt like snakes were coiling and writhing beneath my skin.

And then suddenly it all fell away, and I opened my eyes to find myself standing in an all-too-familiar courtyard, rough cobblestones beneath my feet. The walls of the HYDRA research base rose around me once again, this time tinged in hues of blue and purple. Looking up, I could see no sun or moon in the sky, just an aurora of colour splashed across a starry sky, echoing what lay above me in the physical world. I took a few tentative steps forward, looking around in surprise. This wasn’t what I was expecting. I thought back to the nameless HYDRA goon that had been the first person I’d ever killed, in this or any life other. He’d had an impact, sure, but it felt a little bit like the herb was scraping the bottom of the barrel if that was all it could come up with for me, vision-wise.

I looked at my hands. I was still Wanda. Thinking back, the Ancient One had actually seemed vaguely surprised when she’d seen my astral form. I hadn’t thought much about it at the time—I’d been too busy panicking, and I’d already come to terms with that particular oddity myself when I’d first taught myself to astrally project. Here, though, it felt a bit weightier. If the Ancestral Plane actually existed and was actually an afterlife, then this should be my soul, right? These days I mostly just thought of myself as ‘Wanda’, rather than feeling any real connection to my old face and name. Had I simply come to identify with this body and appearance so greatly that even my soul had changed to match, or was there something deeper to it?

Suddenly, a massive, towering curtain of crimson chaos magic churned into being in front of me, thick and opaque. It swirled around me, passing over the walls of the courtyard and leaving them demolished in its wake, the stone scarred and melted as if the fortress had been torn apart by a firebombing run. I watched in shock, following the red energy as it completed a full rotation around me before disappearing, stripping away the auroras of the Ancestral Plane and leaving a burnt-out ruin in a red-tinged wasteland. As the last of the magic dissipated, it revealed a figure standing opposite me in the bloody red light, less than a dozen feet away.

I froze.

Wanda Maximoff, her hair bright and fiery, clad in an elaborate red dress and crown—the full Scarlet Witch regalia—stood glowering at me, her hands clenched into fists at her sides.

“Wanda…” I trailed off uncertainly.

“You,” she spat, her eyes filled with hatred. “You took everything from me. Everything I could have been.”

“That’s not… I didn’t ask for this.” I looked away from her, wilting under her gaze, my tongue thick in my mouth. “This isn’t something I did to you. It just happened. I don’t know why.”

“Oh, well, that’s okay then. It’s not your fault,” she said, venomous sarcasm dripping from every word. “It’s not your fault you’re here. It’s not your fault you keep pretending to be me. It’s not your fault you lie to Pietro every single day.”

“I had to,” I mumbled, taking an involuntary step backwards. “I would have gone crazy by myself. I couldn’t have done anything without him.”

“You could have left. The Ancient One gave you the chance to go home and you chose to stay. To keep my body.”

I flinched back again like she’d slapped me in the face. I’d been trying not to think about this since we’d fled Kamar-taj. I’d spent so long wondering if Wanda had died, if my arrival had killed her or just displaced her somehow, and the Ancient One seemed to know what I was. If I’d submitted and let myself be sent back, presumably to my old body, would Wanda have come back to hers?

“Even if I had let her send me away, there’s no guarantee it would have brought you back.” The words sounded hollow, even to me. Guilt sat heavy in my chest, pressing down on me like a lead weight.

“You could have tried.”

“I could have. Maybe I should have.” Taking a deep breath to steel myself, I raised my eyes and looked back up at her. “I guess I’m just not a good person.”

“You’re selfish.”

“I am.” The admission made me wince. “I wanted to try to do things better. You didn’t have a happy ending waiting for you. I saw—”

“I don’t care what you saw,” she interrupted, making a dismissive gesture with her hand.

“Pietro died,” I said, and it was her turn to flinch back slightly. “He’d be dead. Right now. If I hadn’t changed things, if I hadn’t stopped Ultron from existing. Pietro would have died. So would a lot of other people.”

Wanda deflated slightly, slumping forward as though she’d been stabbed in the chest. “I don’t… I wouldn’t let that happen.”

“I saw you break,” I continued, swallowing hard as I took a step toward her. “You lost everything, over and over again, and it ate you alive. You were consumed by your grief and took it out on everyone else. You killed a lot of people and then, when you realised what you’d become, you killed yourself.”

Wanda let out a scornful laugh. “…maybe this is my punishment, then,” she said, a bitter edge to her tone. “What do you think yours will be?”

We stood there silently for a few seconds, just staring at each other, before I shook my head. Wiping my eyes with the back of my hand, I looked around at the silent, blasted landscape around us. “Is this place even real, or is it just a hallucination? Are you real?”

“I don’t know,” Wanda said softly, a bitter edge to her tone. “Are you?”

I looked away again, suddenly feeling very exposed. That was the question that cut right to the heart of it, wasn’t it? This world was a story, back in my original life, and I’d asked myself more than once if this was actually really happening, or if I was lying in a hospital bed in a coma somewhere. Or worse. Why did my astral self—my soul—look like Wanda?

“I don’t know, either,” I confessed softly. “I don’t think it matters. I feel real.”

Her eyes softened somewhat. “Then tell Pietro the truth. Tell him who you really are.”

“One day, maybe,” I hedged, feeling incredibly shitty about it even as the words came out. “After I’ve done what I need to do. He… won’t take it well. It’s better for him if he doesn’t know the truth.”

“Maybe,” Wanda scoffed as her gaze hardened again. There was enough weight behind the look she shot me that it almost felt like she’d physically slapped me across the face. “But you always will.”

I lurched back into consciousness, gasping for breath as I sat up with a start, looking wildly around me. I was back in the middle of the bush, the Aurora Australis’s ballet of colour unfolding in the night sky above me. If Pietro had been literally anyone else, I almost certainly would have headbutted him, but he moved easily out of the way before ducking back in to snake a supportive arm around my shoulders. “Easy,” he murmured. “You’re okay.”

I flinched away from the contact, unable and unwilling to look directly at him. With great difficulty, I calmed myself, focusing on controlling my breathing. I felt a little bit odd, like all my muscles were tightly wound. After a few seconds, I nodded and forced a smile onto my face. “I’m okay.”

“Did you see…?” he asked tentatively, his breath misting the air in front of him slightly.

“No,” I said, still not looking at him. “I didn’t see them.”

“What happened? Is everything okay?”

I could hear the anxiety in his voice—misplaced concern for his sister’s wellbeing—and hated myself just a little bit more for it. I shook my head slightly. “It’s fine. I’m fine. I just… need a minute.”

“Wanda…”

I pushed myself to my feet and was startled out of my mental shittiness when I overbalanced forward. Even with the unexpected stumble I caught myself easily, getting my footing back under me almost instantly. Bouncing slightly on my heels, I held my hands out in front of me and flexed my fingers. I looked back at Pietro, eyes wide. “I think it worked.”

“Okay,” he said. “Well… I don’t want to be a jerk, but can we go now? This place is pretty and I’d love to come back sometime, but it’s freezing out here.” Looking at Pietro rubbing at his arms, the cold finally having gotten to him, I realised that I wasn’t as uncomfortable as I had been when we’d first arrived. I could still feel the temperature; it just didn’t bother me anymore.

A sympathetic smile touched my face. “Sure. Let’s get out of here.”