Natasha sighed as they entered the elevator, letting her shoulders relax as she leant back and rested against the cool metal. She’d texted Wanda while they were on the way back to the Tower to let her know that the meeting she’d asked for was on for this evening. It had been a little tricky to organise without Tony catching on—she trusted Wanda that meeting behind his back was necessary for whatever it was she had to say, but Nat really didn’t relish the idea of navigating the resulting conversation if he’d realised that that’s what they were doing. Luckily, Pepper was arriving in New York this afternoon and some polite conversation had revealed that Tony had dinner plans with her, so he would be conveniently out of the Tower.

“Well, that was a shitshow and a half,” Tony commented. “You’d think they might be a little more grateful, but I guess I should lower my expectations. It’s not like they learned from the whole HYDRA debacle.”

Nat shrugged, shooting him a wry smile. “It could have been worse. I think we handled ourselves pretty well in there.”

“You’ve been awfully perky today,” he noted, eyeing her.

“Had a good night.”

“Slept well?”

The elevator doors opened and Nat stepped out past him, carefully turning around to walk backwards for a few paces as she shot him a lopsided grin. “Not at all. I’m exhausted.”

She was actually tempted to have a bit of a snooze in her bunk in the Tower for a couple of hours, but was a little worried that if she lay down, she might not be able to get back up again. Though she was reasonably confident she’d been masking it well, her legs had been so weak and wobbly all day that she’d almost physically had trouble walking out of her apartment that morning. She’d been incredibly grateful that Wanda had been able to portal her to the Tower and that she’d been able to spend basically the entirely morning sitting down. Just the ten-minute walk from Avengers Tower to UN Headquarters had been a massive struggle.

Last night had been… energetic. Nat had previously had suspicions about Wanda being physically Enhanced and it had been gratifying to have Steve confirm the details of that with her earlier this morning. Ignoring for now the added difficulties with Wakanda, it very neatly explained Wanda’s seemingly limitless stamina.

Without overstating anything, Natasha was extensively skilled in the bedroom. It had been a part of her training in the Red Room and she was confident she’d only gotten better as she’d gained experience. Wanda had been clearly less practiced, but she was extremely enthusiastic and just did not seem to get tired. Even after several actual, literal hours of various activities that had left Natasha a weak, sweat-drenched, quivering mess, Wanda had seemed basically fine. In the end Nat had to tap out, which was definitely a novel experience for her.

“Huh,” Tony grunted noncommittally.

Natasha frowned slightly. Normally she’d have expected a crude joke in response. Out of anyone on the team, Tony was by far the least uptight about this sort of thing. Which meant it was the ‘who’ that he had a problem with. “What’s up?”

“Can I borrow you for a sec?” Tony asked, tilting his head toward the briefing room.

“Sure.”

He glanced around as they walked in, checking to see if anyone else was nearby through the glass walls, and Nat started to worry a little bit. Walking over to the far side of the room, he leant against the wall next to one of the screens, arms folded across his chest. “So, Wanda and her ‘visions’. What do you think so far?”

Nat shrugged. “She was right. About all of it—the Red Room, Dreykov, Yelena. They’d managed to conceal themselves from SHIELD and HYDRA. If she didn’t see it the way she says she did, I don’t have a better explanation. I’m starting to believe her.”

“Thought you might say that,” he said with a sigh, shooting her a concerned look. “I don’t trust her. She seems like a nice enough kid, means well and all, but she’s still keeping stuff from us. You know that, right?”

“I mean, yeah, of course she is. What do you expect her to do, just… literally walk us through every little thing she saw? Decades’ worth of experiences?”

“Yeah, well, it’d be better than getting drip-fed the cliff notes whenever she feels like it.”

“I’m not sure it would be, to be honest. The whole Red Room thing…” She looked away from him and shook her head. “Honestly, it had the potential to be really messy. Dreykov being alive all this time, Antonia still being alive… I appreciated the way she chose to handle it. We just aren’t operating from the same context as her.”

“Isn’t that why we need that context?”

“Tony… you’re being a little unreasonable.”

“Am I?” He retrieved his phone from his pocket and tapped at the screen a few times. With a flicking motion, he transferred data from the device to the display next to him. It lit up with what looked like a series of scanned pages from a notebook, fragmented, messy handwriting on cheap, lined paper. “Did you know she’s still keeping a hotel room in Australia? I had some of the Iron Legion check it out. Little Miss Magic has been keeping notes. Thanks for keeping her busy all night, by the way.”

“What the hell, Tony?” Nat said, narrowing her eyes.

“Don’t worry, I was careful. She won’t notice. Anyway, I use the term ‘notes’ loosely—it’s a real mess. I figure she’s been deliberately writing it in shorthand and stuff just in case someone found it, but I’ve got JARVIS running some algorithms over it, see if there’s something we can maybe decipher, look up, cross-reference. Maybe we can catch some of the bigger picture she’s been keeping from us.” He paused, gauging Nat’s expression, then rolled his eyes. “What? Black Widow is objecting to a little bit of simple spycraft now? Hope your judgement’s not compromised, Romanov.”

“You have your ways of getting information, I have mine,” she said, a little defensively.

The reality was that she was feeling compromised. If this was an actual mission, she’d have asked her handler to pull her out by now. When she’d originally approached Wanda, Natasha just hadn’t intended for things to go this far. The plan had been to flirt, lay down some implications, string her along until they were confident that they had her full cooperation going forward, then let her down gently. She still wasn’t quite sure how it had happened but, somewhere along the way, she’d caught some genuine feelings. At first, she’d thought that maybe she was just going soft—it had been a long time since she’d honey trapped someone, after all, but at a certain point she had to admit to herself what she was feeling.

She’d enjoyed herself at the party. Wanda’s earnestness was endearing. She was incorrigibly flirtatious and liked to push boundaries, but was so adorably helpless and easily flustered when someone pushed back. And, despite everything she seemed to know, everything she might have seen… she was still somehow utterly convinced that Natasha was a good person. That she wasn’t a monster. Just talking to Wanda for a little while… her sincerity, the conviction with which she spoke… it was enough to make Natasha’s opinion of herself waver, just a tiny bit. To see herself, even if for just a moment, the way that Wanda saw her.

Then there had been the Red Room. If it had been literally anyone else, she’d have been able to keep her defences up, but Wanda knew things. Not just about what had happened… she knew how Nat felt. At the time, it seemed like Wanda understood how she felt better that Natasha herself did.

It was an unfamiliar, almost scary, feeling, not being able to lie to someone. There was no pretending, no keeping herself closed off—she was completely defenceless and vulnerable, everything on the table. And Wanda was just so damn unrelentingly sincere and supportive the whole time. Utterly determined to be there and do whatever she could to support her, while still seemingly knowing exactly when to step back and let Nat take the lead or give her space and privacy to work through things with Yelena.

Afterwards, Natasha had wanted to thank her and, while the lewder implication had initially been intended as a flirty joke, their little date had turned out basically perfect. When it had come time for it to end, Nat had found that she just… didn’t want it to. Sex wasn’t normally a big deal for her. Her time at the Red Room had thoroughly disabused her of any of the normal emotional associations with it—it had been a tool to be used to her advantage like any other. When she’d invited Wanda upstairs, however, she’d had an unfamiliar knot of anxiety and excitement in her stomach.

“Uh huh,” he nodded. “I’ll bet you’ve been pumping her for information. Just really getting in there.”

“Tony…” Nat said warningly.

“Look, I won’t tell you to be careful. You’re not an idiot; you know to be careful. I just don’t think we can trust her. Not completely. Not yet.” He dismissed the scanned imagines with a wave.

“I get where you’re coming from, Tony, just…” she took a breath. “Talk to me, first, before you do something like this again, okay?”

He looked at her for a few moments, tapping his phone against his palm absently, then nodded. “Fine.”

--

“Okay… so.” I paused for a moment to gather my thoughts, looking around the assembled group. Natasha had pulled together the group of people I’d asked for—her, Steve, Bucky and Bruce—and we were currently all seated around the table in the Tower’s briefing room.

“You said this was about Tony,” she prompted me.

I nodded, then turned to Bucky and shot him an apologetic look. “I’m really, really sorry to put you on the spot like this, but the sooner we resolve this the better.” He went still, a flicker of understanding in his eyes—he knew what was coming. I turned back to the others. “Tony’s parents didn’t die in a car accident. They were murdered. Assassinated, I guess, technically.”

“…The Winter Soldier,” Bruce murmured, glancing over at Bucky with an unreadable expression.

Steve and Nat exchanged a quick, guilty look—they hadn’t specifically known it was Bucky, but they’d been aware for some time that HYDRA had something to do with the death of Tony’s parents. They could have discovered it on their own, but I think that some part of Steve probably hadn’t wanted to dig, hadn’t wanted to find out the truth. He reached over and put his hand on Bucky’s shoulder. “It wasn’t you. You didn’t do it.”

“…it was me, Steve. It was my hands. I remember… I remember them.” He took a deep breath and looked down at the table, avoiding everyone’s gazes. “I remember all of them.”

“I doubt you’ve looked into getting therapy yet, Buck, but trust me—you really do need it.” I glanced over at Steve for a moment. “Make sure he does. Setting that aside for now, let’s refocus on Tony. He’s really not going to take the news well. Like… at the wrong time, it could be absolutely catastrophic.”

“He’s talked a little about his parents before,” said Bruce quietly. “How much he regrets not having a chance to say goodbye. I think he’s got a lot of mixed-up feelings about it and, I mean, you know Tony. It’s not like he’s gone to therapy.”

“I don’t want to intrude on this,” I said. “It’s obviously really personal and he’s not going to appreciate me poking my nose into it. You need to decide the best way of doing this, but I think Pepper should definitely be there when you break the news. Maybe see if Rhodey can be available if you need him, too.”

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Steve nodded slowly, looking thoughtful. “Something happened in your visions. It was bad?”

I took a deep breath, weighing how much was worth getting into. “I can’t really explain it properly. There are a lot of things that are different, so everything’s a bit jumbled up—a lot of it just wouldn’t make sense now. The team was already tense. There were some other things that had happened. A lot of friction. It sort of came out at the worst possible moment.” I made a face, then glanced toward Bucky again. “Tony tried to kill you. He was angry, hurting. Pushed to his breaking point. You and Steve fought him. It… it was the end of the Avengers, basically. It broke the team apart.” Bucky seemed to grow smaller with every word out of my mouth, still looking down at the table.

There was an awkward, drawn-out silence as everyone processed that. “We could show him what we have of the Winter Soldier program?” Steve suggested, his tone subdued. “Refresh his memory on what Bucky’s been through, what HYDRA did to him…”

“That… it feels like it’s just making excuses,” Bucky said quietly.

“It’s not making excuses, Buck. I know you feel guilty, but it literally wasn’t your fault,” I said, shaking my head. “That aside, I don’t think an intellectual approach is going to work that well. Tony’s going to be emotional, he’s not going to rationally be thinking it through, he’s going to be thinking ‘he killed my mom’.”

Everyone went internal again for a few minutes as they grappled with the issue. Eventually, Nat broke the silence. “Pepper and Tony are out tonight. I’ll send her a text and ask to talk privately. We’ll set something up for tomorrow and go from there.”

There were nods and a general murmur of agreement. Steve, Bucky and Bruce stood and made to leave, but I held up a hand. “Buck, stick around for a little bit?” He looked at me like a deer caught in oncoming headlights, but nodded and lowered himself back into the chair.

Natasha took out her phone and looked over at me questioningly. “Do you need the room?”

“Yeah, just for a bit, if that’s okay?”

“Sure thing.”

“Um,” I started as she stood up. “Did you want to hang out tonight? It’s getting late, we could grab something to eat, or…?

Nat grinned, one eyebrow raised. “Sounds good. I’ll warn you in advance, though, I am intending on actually getting a good night’s sleep tonight.”

“Understood.”

Once everyone else had filtered out of the room, leaving Bucky and I alone, I shot him a sympathetic look. “How are you doing? Sorry again for putting you on the spot like that.”

“I’m fine,” he said, a bit too abruptly for it to be completely true.

“Don’t lie to me. I’ve seen the future, remember? I know how much guilt you have over what the Winter Soldier did. I was serious when I said you needed to get therapy. If I don’t hear that you’re getting it yourself, I’ll bundle you up and cart you there myself,” I threatened, a few wisps of red energy playing across my fingers.

He snorted, a weak smile touching his face. “You’re a real pain in the ass, you know that? Worse than Steve.”

“I just want you to get well.”

“Okay, I get it. Fine.”

“Thank you.” I held up my hand expectantly, waiting for his nod of acknowledgement before I reached forward and touched his forehead, small wisps of red power connecting us as I checked over the enchantment binding the Winter Soldier and recharged the magical battery attached to it. “Have you been having any problems?”

“Nothing. I mean…” he hesitated. “I’m still having nightmares. But that’s it.”

I ‘hmm’ed quietly, withdrawing my hand once I was finished my work. “I’ve been thinking. You remember how I described your mental landscape?”

“The Facility, yeah.”

“After what I saw in Yelena’s mind, I’m starting to think that the environment itself might be the real issue—the Winter Soldier persona is a consequence of that, rather than the source of the problem,” I said, a slight frown creasing my forehead. “Restraining the Winter Soldier persona was always just a band-aid fix. It’s mitigating the symptoms but it’s not actually solving the problem. I overcame the Red Room’s control by guiding Yelena, helping her regain access to what had been blocked off. The Facility… it’s a maze, but it can’t be all there is to your mind, right? You’re trapped in it. Maybe what I need to do is get you out. Have you literally or metaphorically move on.”

“…Do you think you can?”

“I mean, there’s only way to find out. It’s not going to solve everything—you’re still going to need that therapy—but maybe we can get you past HYDRA’s programming properly, at least. A permanent solution, instead of a band-aid.”

He nodded slowly. “Do it.”

“You want me to try right now?”

“Yeah.” He faltered a bit. “Uh, if that’s okay. Do you need the Mind Stone?”

“I don’t think so. I’ve mostly been using it as an amplifier—I don’t think I actually need it for something like this.”

“Okay. So you can try?”

“Did you want to go get Steve?”

Bucky shook his head. “I don’t want to burden him any more than I already have. He’s got enough on his plate with Tony right now. You should be able to restrain me safely on your own, right?”

“You know Steve would be happy to be here for you, right? You don’t have to do this stuff alone.”

He set his jaw stubbornly. “I know.”

“Ugh, men. Fine. Do you just want to do it here or should we find somewhere more comfortable for me to pin you down and have my way with you?” I asked, grinning impishly. “Full disclosure, Nat and I are kind of dating now? Well, maybe not dating. We haven’t put a label on it yet, but I’m hopeful. I don’t think she’d mind, though.”

“Can we please be serious?”

“Who’s not being serious?” I said, which he responded to with a flatter, even more unimpressed look. Smiling innocently, I wondered if he was still traumatised from having been forced to explain to Steve what I’d meant at the party about ‘visiting the Eiffel Tower’.

“Wanda…”

“Hold still,” I instructed, tendrils of magic already wrapping around his body. I limited the power I was investing, strengthening the bonds by making them several overlapping layers rather than relying on single, powerful strands. Once I was satisfied, I tied off the power.

I was getting better at this. I’d been practicing when I’d had the chance to do so over the past week. All else being equal, these bonds would last for almost a whole hour without any refreshing. If I created a secondary linked battery enchantment, they could maybe last a couple of days. I still couldn’t really think of any actual useful use-case for them outside of ad-hoc stuff like this, seeing as handcuffs were cheaper and didn’t require ongoing maintenance, but still. The big problem was that I had no idea how to reinforce them against magical interference. Kaecilius had disrupted my first attempt with what amounted to a wave of his hand. I still didn’t understand how ‘dispelling’ magical effects worked—not beyond brute-force tearing them apart, at least—so I had no insight into how to protect against it.

“Comfy?”

“Yeah… it’s great.”

“Cool.”

I pressed my palm flat against his forehead, summoning my power and delving deeply into his mind. Once more, I found myself in the maze of corridors that we were calling the Facility, which seemed to be an amalgam of the memories of several different bases that the Winter Soldier had been kept in over the years he’d been in HYDRA’s clutches.

Twenty minutes later, I pulled out. Bucky looked at me hopefully, but I just frowned and shook my head, dismissing the bindings. “I found your avatar, but no luck finding a way out of the Facility yet. I still think we’re on the right track, but…”

“We’re still missing something,” he said quietly. “Thanks, anyway.”

I nodded and grinned at him. “Hey, don’t worry. We’re trying to undo, like, decades of mental conditioning. I’d have been surprised if it was going to be easy. We’ll get there, I promise.”

--

“Okay, yeah, you were right. Colour me interested,” Natasha said as the credits rolled on the first episode, Netflix’s little alert that it would start the next episode soon popping up on screen.

“Right?” I nabbed the remote and hit ‘back’ to stop the autoplay.

We were curled up on her couch, a set of empty Chinese food takeaway containers on the coffee table in front of us. We had no idea where Yelena was—she hadn’t been there when we’d arrived and she hadn’t texted Nat or anything to let her know when she’d be back. Natasha wasn’t worried; Yelena was an adult and could look after herself.

“So, all of the characters are, what, connected psychically or something?” she asked.

“I won’t say much, don’t want to spoil anything, but yeah.”

“Do you have a favourite?”

“Jeez, that’s a hard question. Overall, maybe Sun? I always liked Nomi a lot, as well, we—” I cut myself off, suddenly feeling very small and disconnected.

“Seeing as?” Nat prompted me gently.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, sitting up. Absently, I wrapped my arms around myself, rubbing at my upper arms as if I’d suddenly felt a chill.

Natasha reached over and touched my shoulder, pushing at it gently so I’d turn and look at her. “You can talk to me, you know,” she said softly. “This isn’t just a one-way street.”

“It’s just… I don’t really know who I am anymore. Things I used to feel a connection to—or thought I did… I don’t know. It doesn’t feel real anymore.”

“This is about what the Ancient One said about you?” she guessed.

“Not just about that. I… okay, I know how this is going to sound, but I knew things that I shouldn’t have been able to know.”

Natasha grinned, sympathetic but obviously suppressing a chuckle. “Oh, wow, you knew something you shouldn’t? That seems so unlike you.”

I smiled back, then sighed. “It’s just I have these memories. A whole life, growing up, everything. But it’s distant. Disconnected. Almost… like it happened to someone else, I guess? When I woke up, after the Mind Stone unlocked my magic, everything about Wanda was gone. As far as I knew, I was just… someone else, trapped in a stranger’s body. Only she wasn’t a stranger, I knew her.”

“From your visions.”

My mouth opened and I barely managed to stop myself. I very, very nearly just went ahead and told her the absolute truth about my ‘visions’. Instead, I swallowed the words, nodding and averting my eyes. “…Yeah. For more than a year, that’s what I thought. I tried using my magic to look inside myself to see if she was in here, too, but I never felt her. Never found any trace. But my body doesn’t feel like someone else’s. It just feels like mine. I don’t think of myself by any other name, just… I’m Wanda. The name feels right, you know? Then it turns out the world’s foremost expert on magic is surprised that I don’t think I’m Wanda because my soul—the most essential, inner part of me—is also just… Wanda.”

Natasha’s forehead creased, her expression sympathetic. “It sounds confusing,” she said gently.

“After we left Kamar-taj, Pietro and I talked. He… he couldn’t accept it. Wouldn’t accept it. There was yelling. Crying.” My face was growing hot again, the words both harder to say and somehow tumbling out faster than I could stop them. “And then something happened. I said something in Sokovian, remembered something about our parents. See? I just called them our parents without thinking, just then. But I remembered some stuff that I really shouldn’t have because that’s part of Wanda, not me. It’s not stuff I saw in my visions, or if it is I don’t remember it. And now… where does that leave me? Who am I?” I realised I was crying now, tears streaming down my face.

Natasha swept me into a hug, wrapping her arms around me and pulling me in close. I leaned into her gratefully, burying my face in her shoulder while I took a few moments to compose myself. After a little while, she took hold of my shoulders and pushed me back slightly, so she could look me in the eye. “Who do you feel like you are?”

“I told you, I don’t… I just feel like me. Wanda.”

“Then that’s who you are,” she said firmly. Her hands moved from my shoulders to my cheeks, cradling my face. “You’re Wanda. I don’t know what’s true about your past. I don’t know about these memories you have, or don’t have. I didn’t know pre-HYDRA Wanda, or whoever this other life was. The only Wanda I know is you—the one who’s been doing her best this whole time, even when it was hard. That’s who you are to me. That’s my Wanda.”

I opened my mouth again, but no words came out. God, I wanted to tell her that I loved her so badly. Which I knew was crazy—it was way, way too soon for that. We’d only just started seeing each other. We weren’t even officially dating. We’d just spent one night together. I didn’t want to scare her off, or push her away, or mess this up in any way. “Thank you,” I eventually settled on. Natasha leaned in, kissing me gently, then pulled me into another hug.

Once I’d managed to pull myself together a bit, we stood and cleaned up the takeaway containers. While Natasha was taking care of a few things in the kitchen, I went ahead and brushed my teeth using a spare toothbrush she’d laid out for me, then headed to the bedroom.

It was a warm night, so I just stripped off everything except for my underwear bottoms and sat on the bed, looking at my phone while Natasha caught up. I hadn’t seen Pietro all day—he hadn’t called or texted, either. It felt a bit weird, not having him around for an entire day, like a piece of myself was missing. I hesitated, then typed him a short message: Hey, hope everything’s okay. See you tomorrow?

I dropped the phone on top of the neat pile I’d made of my clothes and lay back with a sigh. Nat walked in, eyeing me with a slight smile as she closed the door behind her. She stripped out of her clothes, matching my partial nudity, then turned off the light and crawled into bed beside me. “Night,” she said, quietly.

“Night,” I replied, hesitating for a moment. “Nat?”

“Yeah?”

I rolled onto my side, facing away from her. “Cuddle me?”

She chuckled. “Sure.”

We lay like that for a time, Natasha spooning me, snuggled close against me with one arm draped lightly across my waist, her hand resting gently on my stomach. I had just started to drift off to sleep when she flexed her fingers, slowly running them across my belly and up my side. I stirred, making a small contented noise in the back of my throat, and she shifted, lifting her head to bring her lips to the side of my neck.

I made another, even more indecent noise as she kissed my skin, grazing it gently with her teeth and tongue as her hand crept higher to cup the swell of my breast. Reaching up, I lightly traced the back of her hand with a finger, red wisps of energy slipping around her wrist before gently pulling her backwards off me. In the darkness, I could just make out Nat’s look of surprise as I rolled over to face her. With a gesture, my power took firm hold of her other hand as well, drawing them both upwards until her wrists were bound over her head, telekinetically pinned to the headboard. “You,” I said, a mild reproach in my voice, “told me you just wanted to get a good night’s sleep tonight.”

Natasha pouted playfully. “Well, yeah, but… we don’t have anything on tomorrow until the afternoon. I wouldn’t mind a nightcap.”

With another gesture, wisps of red energy played across her bare skin, tracing her curves, and she inhaled sharply. “You know,” I murmured huskily, “I’ve been thinking that I could potentially have a lot of fun with this. I’ve basically got access to unlimited ropes, handcuffs, straps, chains… whatever toys and tools I could ever need. What do you think? I’ve never really gotten into that sort of thing before, but I’m starting to feel a little… creative.”

Nat’s eyes had grown wider and rounder as I spoke, her breathing growing heavier. “Express yourself, then,” she whispered.