Present day…
I flopped down heavily on the bed, wincing internally when it creaked alarmingly beneath me, and sighed. Glancing toward the window of the tiny hotel room, I looked out at the steadily-darkening sky outside, silently willing Pietro to be back soon. A spring was poking me in the back, the threadbare mattress only marginally better than what I’d gotten used to at the HYDRA research base, and I shifted a few times, trying to get comfortable. When that failed, I sat back up and swung my legs over the edge of the bed, looking around the room.
The faded floral wallpaper, cracked ceiling, and chipped off-white paint was certainly a far cry from the height of luxury, but compared to concrete block walls and harsh metal fittings the cheap grimy hotel felt practically like a different world. There was even a little lamp on the bedside table.
Even though these were probably the nicest surroundings I’d had since I’d arrived in this world, I still felt tense. Trapped. It had been two days since the Avengers attacked the HYDRA base, and we’d spent that time laying low. Part of the reason the Avengers had attacked the HYDRA research base was specifically because Thor was trying to retrieve Loki’s sceptre and, when they found it missing, they would almost certainly review the security footage and see us taking it. Like it or not, we were probably Avengers priority one at the moment.
After a year stuck in a HYDRA facility, unable to move freely, I’d gone ahead and stuck myself right back into a cage of my own making. I’d spent so much time pacing back and forth over the past two days I unironically thought I might actually start wearing a hole in the carpet. It was different for Pietro, of course—his speed meant he could move a lot more freely than I could without too much risk of being caught.
I retrieved my pen and notebook from where I’d temporarily discarded them on the floor. The pad was one of the first things I’d asked Pietro to get for me when we’d settled in to hide and when I wasn’t pacing, I was scrawling in it. I opened it, flipping past several pages of completely disorganised notes to a place a bit further in, where I’d started rewriting my thoughts in a more structured way. Ideally, I’d have gotten a laptop so I could organise things better, but Pietro hadn’t managed that just yet. In any case, this place was so cheap it didn’t have Wi-Fi, so I wouldn’t have been able to do any of the research I wanted to do yet anyway.
The first pages of the notebook were covered in scribbled notes on everything I could remember about the MCU. I’d started with an approximate timeline of films and series—the exact order of some of it was a little fuzzy to me, but I did the best I could—and branched out from there, including as much shorthand detail as I could. Important people and their current/future locations, where each of the Infinity Stones currently were, and anything else I could think of that might possibly be of help.
Thanos and the stones loomed large over everything. I wanted to stop him if possible—I didn’t want to risk being Snapped away—but I had no way of getting ahead of him unless I worked out a way to get off-planet, which seemed daunting. The alternative was to focus on securing my position on Earth, holding onto the Mind Stone and fighting a defensive battle when he decided to show himself, per the original timeline. I wasn’t keen on that as a plan, seeing as it didn’t actually work.
In the original timeline, Doctor Strange had put up a good showing against Thanos one-on-one, even though he’d already collected four of the stones. I knew Wanda had the potential to become at least as strong as Strange, without even taking in account any extra advantages I might be able to wrangle for myself. I wasn’t particularly interested in a knock-down superhero battle if I could help it, but it was reassuring to think that if it did come to that I might be able to arrange things so that I had the upper hand.
Each stone was a threat multiplier for Thanos, so keeping even one out of his hands would make a significant difference. I had the Mind Stone already, Loki’s sceptre currently stashed in a duffle bag tucked under the bed. The Time Stone was at Kamar-taj and reasonably safe. The Soul Stone was out of reach, most likely. Even if I were willing to sacrifice someone to get it—which I wasn’t—the only person I had was Pietro and, given our relationship, I had no guarantee that that would even work. The Power Stone was locked away on Xandar somewhere, and I wasn’t sure where it was kept. The Space Stone was in Asgard’s vault and was likely to stay there until Hela was freed.
The Reality Stone… I had no idea why Odin had thought it was a good idea to entrust the stone to the Collector, but as far as I was concerned the dude was basically just an asshole. If I could get to Knowhere, it seemed like it was the least well-defended, as well the one whose current custodian I had absolutely no qualms about kicking in the head if I needed to. Getting into space in the first place was still a problem, though, so I was back to square one on that for now.
Even if and when I did manage to stop Thanos, there were a whole slew of other problems, the biggest of which—both literally and figuratively—was Tiamut. The Snap had explicitly delayed the Celestial’s Emergence, and the more things diverged the less useful my foreknowledge was going to be and the more things could go wrong. Though the specifics of Eternals were a little hazy in my memory—it was one of the few MCU films I had only actually seen once—I did remember that overcoming the adversity caused by the Snap and going on to undo it was one of the things that the Eternals had held up as proof that humanity was worth fighting for.
Take that away and things became unpredictable. If even one extra Eternal sided with Ikaris and Sprite, Sersi would probably not be able to stop the Emergence, and right now I couldn’t see any other clear route to preventing it outside of something like the Infinity Gauntlet. Technological solutions didn’t seem like they’d be able to match the sheer scale of the problem. I had telepathy and mind control in my magical toolkit, but I doubted I’d be able to put Tiamut to sleep permanently myself. Maybe the Ancient One would have some better ideas?
Taking on a Celestial, even just a newborn, seemed daunting. And even if we succeeded, what then? Arishem would definitely come to find out what had happened. It was one thing for him to spare the Earth when his pet Eternals killed Tiamut in the original timeline, but what would his reaction be if that wasn’t the case? Was there any chance at all we could stop him if he decided to exterminatus us in response? Dude was literally the size of a planet.
I took a break from my notetaking to close my eyes, pressing the heels of my hands against my temples. I could just run. Once I stopped Thanos, I could just give up on Earth entirely and find somewhere else in the universe to retire. Maybe I could find a nice place on Xandar or something and settle down. I didn’t actually need to be a hero. I was already getting a second chance in another universe, complete with rockin’ new bod and magical superpowers. I could do whatever I wanted to.
I sighed and opened my eyes again. One problem at a time.
First, I needed resources. I had no allies beyond Pietro, and we had no base of operations or assets. We also had no way to research things beyond basically just Googling them, so it was going to be an uphill battle to find things when I wasn’t sure of exact locations. Even when I did know where something or someone was, we didn’t have any secure transportation. Even if we stole something for overland travel, neither of us knew how to fly a plane, so we’d be stuck using civilian transport which risked getting us flagged and intercepted by the Avengers, who would be looking for us.
The Avengers were an awkward problem. Working out a way to join them in a trusted capacity would be ideal and put me in a position where I could just point a powerful group of good guys at problems. Only I couldn’t see any way of doing that safely or reliably just yet. They would have looked through HYDRA’s files by now, which meant they knew about Wanda and Pietro Maximoff and our backgrounds and, knowing we’d taken the sceptre, they’d be starting from a baseline assumption that we were up to no good.
Even when Wanda had joined them in the original timeline, she hadn’t exactly been a super-trusted member of the team. Handing over the sceptre willingly might go a decent way to starting a friendly relationship, but would also immediately alienate my one actually dependable ally, and came with a risk that Ultron might be back on the table. I needed to establish myself first, and then I could reach out on a more even footing as an ally.
With the Avengers being out of reach for now, I could think of two other factions that might be able to supply us with what we needed, both of which were worth investigating: Wakanda and Kamar-taj.
Wakanda was tricky, of course, due to their isolationist nature, but the right approach might get us entry and maybe more. I knew that Ulysses Klaue was based near Johannesburg, and I was confident that Pietro and I were capable of taking down his operation. With any luck, the goodwill we’d earn by handing Klaue and his stolen vibranium over to Wakanda would at least allow us to beg an audience with King T’Chaka, and we could go from there. If I couldn’t have access to Stark’s tech, Wakanda’s was the next best thing.
Kamar-taj, on the other hand, would probably be easier to find. I honestly had no idea if I had the inclination or ability to be trained as a sorcerer, or how it would even interact with my chaos magic. The monastery was, however, a treasure trove of magical knowledge and might hold books on witchcraft in its libraries, which would be a welcome change from the trial and error I’d been using up until this point. Given the only alternative source of learning about witchcraft that I knew of was Agatha Harkness and the Darkhold, it seemed like a pretty solid bet.
Not only that, but a sling ring would easily be the single most useful asset I could get my hands on. Secure one of those and I’d have on-tap instantaneous travel anywhere in the world. While Strange himself struggled initially with learning to use one, I guessed that that was mostly due to his background and mindset. At the other extreme was Ned, Peter Parker’s friend… and if a completely untrained natural talent could get one working by accident in less than a day without formal instruction, with any luck I should be able to pick it up given my own magical aptitude.
While instant travel in and of itself was something worth seeking out, from what I could tell sling rings also seemed to work on a conceptual level. You could portal with pinpoint accuracy if you wanted to, but you didn’t actually have to have been to the place you were travelling in order to call one up. Hell, you didn’t even actually need to know the specific place you were going, you could call a portal up through association, by invoking a person, which made them even more useful than they already were.
It was also at least theoretically possible to use them to travel interplanetary distances—Doctor Strange had created a portal from Titan back to Earth in order to participate in the final battle against Thanos. Then again, that feat was never replicated and might have had some unique circumstances allowing it, but given my current lack of any other options for going off-planet, it wasn’t something I could afford not to investigate.
I was so utterly absorbed in my work that I didn’t hear the footsteps outside the door, or the subsequent turn of a key in the lock. The door of the room swung open, and my heart immediately leapt into my throat as I dropped low into a combat stance, notepad dashed to the ground, swirling coronas of red energy flaring up around my hands.
Pietro looked at me, grinning, as he carefully stepped into the room and used his foot to close the door again behind him, his hands filled with an assortment of bags. “This a bad time?”
“Idiot,” I said, heaving a sigh of relief and letting my hands drop to my sides. The energy dispersed, but my heart was still racing. “I could have killed you.”
He shook his head, a small smirk curving one side of his mouth. “I don’t think so. You’re too slow.” He walked over to the foot of the bed and put the bags he was carrying down. “We were careful, the Avengers won’t find us that quickly. Here, have a bagel. You always get grumpy when you haven’t eaten.”
I rolled my eyes and accepted the bagel, my traitorous stomach choosing that moment to growl loudly. Pietro grinned and I glared at him, unwrapping the sandwich and taking a petulant bite from it as I sat back down on the bed. It made me even grumpier that the bagel was really, really good.
It made sense from Pietro’s perspective that I’d be worried about the Avengers pursuing us—which, fair enough, I was—but there was another threat looming that I was a bit more concerned about. However, I couldn’t exactly tell Pietro that I’d been jumpy since we abandoned HYDRA because I was worried that time travellers might come and erase us from existence.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
The Time Variance Authority. I was already going to be dropping the existence of magic on Pietro, and that was something I could at least show some evidence for. Time travel was a completely different matter. With any luck, I had nothing to worry about. I wasn’t sure what the TVA’s general response time was, but it had been two full days since we absconded with the sceptre. They’d shown up to capture Loki pretty damn quick when he’d gone off track, so if we hadn’t seen them by now it hopefully meant that the Sacred Timeline wasn’t a thing anymore. Or had never been a thing? Time travel is weird. I never know what the right tense to use is.
“You were gone longer than I expected,” I said before taking another bite.
“I made a few stops. Made a house call for Filip. The doctor will fill his prescription from now on—no more insurance hassle.”
“Oh?” I looked at him accusingly. “Just that?”
Pietro grinned and shrugged his shoulders. “Like I said, a few stops.”
“Uh huh. So am I the only girl in Sokovia who doesn’t get a pretty new dress from Paris, or…?”
“Ah.” His grin turned sheepish for a moment before he held up a finger. “Actually…” He fumbled through the bags at his feet for a moment before pulling out a chic, long-sleeved leather jacket. Waggling his eyebrows, he held it up for my inspection. “Eh? Eh?”
I couldn’t help it, I laughed. “You’re ridiculous.”
“And!” he said, draping the jacket over the foot of the bed and returning to the bags for a moment. After a second, he laid out a red dress and a pair of red leather Dr Martens next to it.
“Stompy boots,” I breathed reverentially, eyes wide.
Pietro grinned again, shrugging airily. “Of course, only the stompiest boots for my sister.”
My smile faded a bit and I looked away. A moment later, there was a nudge at my shoulder and I took the proffered bottle of water gratefully, washing down the bagel that had already somehow mysterious disappeared into my stomach.
I closed my eyes and let out a loud sigh, rubbing the centre of my forehead with a thumb. I was getting a headache. A moment later, I felt the bed shift as Pietro sat down next to me. I turned my head to look—he sat facing me, cross-legged, concern evident on his features. “Wanda… Are you okay?”
I straightened up and gave a tight smile. “I’m fine,” I lied. Pietro didn’t respond. He just sat there, looking at me, until I wilted a bit under his gaze. “There’s just a lot I need to think about. Things are going to be even more dangerous from here on out.”
Pietro leaned forward, wrapping an arm around my shoulders and pulling me into a hug. I tilted my head, resting it on his chest. I could hear his heartbeat, strong and even. “And we’ll face them together, like we always have,” he said. “I’m here, remember? You can talk to me. You don’t have to do everything yourself.”
I didn’t realise how stiff I had been until I felt some of the tension leave my body. The hug was nice. “I just…” I started, stopping immediately when I noticed a slight quaver in my voice. Okay, so twelve months of intense, borderline-abusive training by HYDRA, my ongoing paranoia that I’d slip up and reveal something I shouldn’t, a hurried flight that made us fugitives from both the good and bad guys, and constant, crushing feelings of isolation might be impacting my mental health a little.
Pietro stayed quiet, letting me work through what I wanted to say. “I’m sorry. I haven’t really felt like I’ve been able to talk to you freely, with HYDRA recording and dissecting every waking moment. When the sceptre awakened my powers, there was… more. Something I’ve been keeping to myself, that I couldn’t let them know about.”
I felt Pietro nod slowly. “I thought it was just the memory loss. Ever since the sceptre changed us, you’ve been… different. I’ve missed my sister.”
I tensed up again. This was wretched. I couldn’t tell him she was gone. I couldn’t. I needed him.
Pietro’s hand moved from my shoulder and started gently stroking my hair. “It’s okay,” he whispered. “You’re safe. I’m here.”
I swallowed, my tongue feeling thick and heavy in my mouth. Was I going to cry? A little, it seemed like. I blinked furiously, pushing back tears, and was only mostly successful. “When I touched the sceptre,” I said slowly. “I saw visions. People, places, events. The past and future. I saw the fall of SHIELD before it happened. I knew the Avengers would come; I saw what would happen if we’d gone out to fight them when they attacked the base. I saw what would happen if they took the sceptre. I saw everything.”
Pietro’s hand stilled. “…you saw the future?”
I nodded. “And not just that. Hidden secrets. Things I shouldn’t be able to know. Our powers… are different.” I pulled back slightly so I could look up at him. “You were imbued with something, a spark, but for me it was like it woke up something that was already there. The sceptre just unlocked it. Sped it up.”
“And what does that mean?” he asked.
“I know this is going to sound crazy, but… magic.”
“Magic?”
The corner of my mouth quirked upwards. “Not exactly I Dream of Jeannie, but yeah.”
“You’re right, that does sound a bit crazy,” Pietro said, half-smiling back. His brow was furrowed, though, his expression undecipherable.
“We live in a crazy world.”
“True enough.” He shrugged. “But what does that mean? What’s our next step? Are we going after Stark?”
I shook my head. “There’s a place with other people who can use magic: Kamar-taj. It’s in Kathmandu.”
“Nepal? Really?”
“Yes, really. The leader there—the Ancient One—I think she can help us. I can hopefully learn more about my powers, and she has experience dealing with artefacts like the sceptre.” I dropped my head back to his chest and sighed. “There are a lot of ways forward, but I think this one has the best chance of working out.”
We sat quietly for a little while. I listened to Pietro’s heartbeat, feeling his chest rise and fall as he breathed. The gentle motion was soothing, and it didn’t take long for my eyelids to start feeling a bit heavy. I yawned, and in response Pietro gave me a squeeze and ducked his head to kiss me on the forehead. “Okay,” he said. “I don’t know about magic or anything, but I’m done waiting around. I trust you, you know? If you think we need to do this, then we’ll do it.”
--
Four months earlier…
Marvel did Wanda dirty.
I remember leaving the cinema thinking that after the disappointing finale of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. It wasn’t a terrible movie, exactly, or at least it wasn’t the worst one Marvel had put out. Still, I’d been hyped for it and had been let down by the arc they had put one of my favourite characters through.
And now I was here, looking at my reflection in a dirty mirror in a tiny, grey-brick bathroom and seeing Wanda Maximoff staring back at me. It was like Kevin Feige and Sam Raimi had heard my disappointment and drop-kicked me across the multiverse in response, putting me here as if to say, “Go on, then. You do a better job.”
I held a hand up in front of me. I could feel the power, bubbling away below the surface, and it took only the slightest effort of will for a faint swirl of red energy to play across my fingers. I had no idea how to really explain what I was doing—the actual mechanics were beyond me for now, though I’d spent long months learning how to control it rather than have it express itself randomly whenever I got emotional.
Flexing my fingers, I gestured toward the side of the sink. The toothbrush rose up and threaded through the air, guided by the tendrils of misty red energy weaving between my fingers. It had been surprisingly easy to work out basic control. The gestures significantly helped when directing the magic inside of me—refining the movements was extremely intuitive, my fingers naturally finding the rhythm depending on what I was trying to do. They seemed like a crutch to me, and I knew that Wanda had eventually been capable of shielding herself without even looking in the direction she was being attacked from, but I needed a lot more practice to get to that point.
That had always been one of Wanda’s major issues. For the longest time she didn’t know she was a witch, didn’t know she was using magic, and didn’t know what she was potentially capable of. She had just been making it up as she went along. I, on the other hand, had already seen Wanda at her strongest: a near-unstoppable force that neither the combined might of Kamar‑taj nor the Illuminati could hold a candle to. I had seen the versatility and power of her magic. I couldn’t imagine what would have been possible if she had sought out proper training.
Initially, I had had no idea what to do. This research base was where Wanda had first learned to control her power, so I was just following in her footsteps for now. The original timeline was… okay. All the villains were eventually defeated in the end and the world survived. A lot of people had died, though, or worse. Planets destroyed, even. I’d spent a lot of time thinking about what I should do—whether I should just follow along for the most part, playing the role of Wanda and hoping everything works out as normal, diverging only so far as to not walk the original’s road to villainy. It seemed like a dangerous assumption, to think that everything would play out exactly the same.
I looked back up at the mirror, once again searching the now-familiar green eyes for any trace of the woman whose body I had been thrust into. The abilities of the Scarlet Witch included a degree of telepathic ability, but no matter how I looked I couldn’t find anything of her in my own mind. Was she gone? Dead? Did me coming here kill her? I had no idea how it was even possible for me to be here, so I had no context to work out if Wanda could be saved, or if it was too late for her.
Pietro was worried about his sister. Dr List had diagnosed me with retrograde amnesia, but even beyond that I obviously hadn’t been acting exactly like Wanda. Pietro had only grown more and more restless in the months since we’d been introduced to Baron Strucker and more formally inducted into HYDRA. Maybe me being here had already altered things more than I thought.
I finished brushing my teeth and winced when I put the toothbrush down, my ribs protesting slightly. Gingerly I took off my dress, lifting it up over my head and dropping it on the floor, then stripped out of my underwear. Standing naked in front of the mirror, I looked over the absolute mess of angry red and purple marks covering my body. On the one hand: gender euphoria. On the other: a gruelling training regime, overseen by literal Nazi taskmasters. I was never particularly good at motivating myself to exercise or stick with a difficult task, but you know what did wonders for one’s motivation? A dozen HYDRA scientists monitoring every aspect of your existence, all dedicated to making you ‘live up to your potential’. Sorcerers hate her because of this one weird trick!
There was a particularly bad-looking bruise on my side, a deep purple mark the size of a grapefruit spattered with the telltale darker spots of burst blood vessels and edged in sickly yellow. I touched it experimentally with my fingertips and let out a quiet hiss of pain. This past week had been particularly bad—Dr List had been so delighted with my progress at learning to shield myself that he’d taken to pitting me against groups of a dozen soldiers at a time, their guns loaded with ‘nonlethal’ rounds. The exercises were intended to speed up my reflexes, make it so I could react instinctively to danger, shielding myself and lashing out without needing to consciously make the decision to do so. I wasn’t there yet.
Shaking my head, I stepped toward the shower and reached in to turn the water on. A few minutes later, I was standing under the spray, letting it wash over me and carry away the sweat and grime I’d accumulated during the day. The water was colder than I’d have liked it to be, leaving goosebumps rising on my skin, but it felt good on my bruises. Once I was done, I dried myself off, put on some fresh underwear and the light shift I wore to bed, and got ready to turn in for the night. At least my accommodations were a step up from the cell I’d been kept in for my first few months here. Sure, it was still a cramped room with basically nothing in it but a fold-out canvas cot and set of drawers for my clothes, but at least I had my own little ensuite—no door, unfortunately—and the illusion of privacy.
It was only an illusion, of course. I knew exactly where all five of the cameras were in the room, recording every single thing I did. I’d seen the control room where they were monitored from, and heard the crude comments some HYDRA personnel made about me when they thought they were alone.
Flicking the light switch, I lay down on the cot and pulled the blanket over me. Right up until her villainous turn, Wanda had insisting that she wasn’t a witch and that she didn’t know magic. I had a significant leg up on her—while she obviously got a lot from the Darkhold, it was pretty obvious that a lot of things only took as long as they did for her to learn because she had no reason to even think she was capable of them. Turns out, it was actually incredibly difficult to teach yourself magic from scratch, especially when you didn’t know what you ‘should’ be able to do. Who knew?
I took a deep breath, calming my mind, and closed my eyes. A moment later I jerked forward, floating up, free of my body.
The first time I had astral projected, a part of me had thought that my astral form might resemble my original body. I wasn’t completely clear on what my astral form actually was, but given that—in the original timeline—Bruce Banner still looked like himself when the Ancient One popped him out of the Hulk’s body, I had assumed it was your soul or had some relation to your own self-image. However, given that my astral form looked exactly the same as my physical one, that couldn’t be accurate.
This had been my routine for the last few months. Each day, Pietro and I would face Dr List and his minions together. They’d push us to the limit, forcing us to learn better control over our powers, to be stronger, faster, better. Each evening, I’d collapse into bed a mess of aching muscles and bruises, and while my body rested I would slip into the ether, my astral form escaping my body to invisibly investigate the areas of the base that were off-limits to me, eavesdropping on Strucker and List whenever possible.
Recently, however, I’d added a new trick to my repertoire. I twisted in mid-air, looking down at my prone form, and focused my mind. There was a slight pressure, but I pushed through it and suddenly my vision was doubled—I could still see myself lying down on the cot below me, but I could also see myself floating, translucent, in the air above me. It made me a bit dizzy, and moving too quickly like this was extremely disorienting, but I was slowly getting used to the feeling.
Simultaneously, both versions of me raised an arm and summoned red wisps of energy across their fingertips. Forcing my body to move while I was astral projecting was intensely difficult—even just mirroring my astral self felt wrong, like I was trying to physically be in two places at once. The first time Wanda was even shown astral projecting on-screen, she was already capable of simultaneously doing something completely different with her physical body, seemingly effortlessly. I was still a long way off that, but this was my proof that I could push beyond Wanda’s early limitations and I was determined to master it.