I gestured, sending my bundle of vibranium spears floating over everyone’s heads to rest in the corner of the room out of the way. Around me, the Avengers collectively took a moment to compose themselves, make sure that everyone was okay and there wasn’t anyone in need of urgent medical attention. The room wasn’t ideal for it—a cramped hotel room meant for two guests wasn’t exactly designed for a crowd of eight.
Once he’d shrugged off Steve, Tony looked around critically, a frown on his face. “What is this? This is tiny. We’ve got the facility upstate. It’s basically ready to use; we were going to move in in the next couple of months, anyway.” He reached into his pocket, pulling out his smartphone. “We can regroup there and—”
He was cut off as I snatched his phone from his hand with red wisps of telekinetic energy. I clenched my fist, crushing the device, its screen cracking and flickering off as it died. “Don’t you get it?” I snapped at him. “She’s in all your systems. All of them. The Tower, the phones, the facility upstate, everything. Everyone needs to lose their phones and anything else she might be able to use to track us.” Tony’s face twisted into an angry scowl but I ignored him, looking around at everyone else instead.
Nat reached into her pocket, only hesitating slightly, before tossing her phone onto the bed near me. Steve was next, followed closely by Pietro, then Bruce and Clint. I was pretty sure that the only reason Pietro hadn’t been first was because he wasn’t used to having a phone at all yet. Each of the devices were summarily crushed by a small application of telekinetic force after they landed on the sheets.
“My Snap,” Clint said mournfully as he looked at the fragmented debris.
“Okay, now explain,” Tony said angrily, his jaw working. “Who has control of our systems?”
I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t know how to do this. I felt numb. Was I in shock? Probably. Instead of responding to him, I scooped up the TV remote from where it lay on the bedside table and hit the power button, changing the channel once before a breaking news program came on.
“—we’re just getting word that another series of explosions has resulted in the complete collapse of Avengers Tower. Reports are still coming in, but so far the only confirmed survivor of the battle is the American team’s billionaire backer, Tony Stark, though his whereabouts are currently unknown. We’re getting some footage from a local team now, streaming live from the site.”
The screen changed, showing a street-level view of the areas just outside the Tower. It looked like the building had collapsed inwards and almost directly down, but there were still ruined wrecks of cars smoking on the street and the nearby buildings were pockmarked with incidental damage and destroyed windows. The streets were blanketed with what I assumed was a layer of concrete dust, glass, and small bits of rubble.
“Petty,” I said quietly as I pressed the mute button, letting the footage continue to play. “She knew she wouldn’t get any of us with that. It was just… anger. Frustration. A final ‘fuck you’.”
“At least it fell straight down, not across. It looks more like a controlled demolition than anything else,” Steve said gently, touching my shoulder. “The streets around the Tower would have been cleared pretty soon after the Quinjet crashed. We’ve got an MOU with the NYPD, they know what to do if there’s an incident. If we’re lucky, not too many people got hurt.”
My face grew hot, shoulders slumping slightly, then suddenly Natasha was there. She sidled past Steve to get to me, putting an arm around my shoulders to pull me into a hug. I didn’t want to—God, I was angry with her as well—but I couldn’t help myself as I sagged heavily into the embrace and buried my face in her shoulder. I was trembling, my breathing laboured as I worked to suppress the tears that were suddenly threatening to spill out.
“It’s okay,” Natasha said soothingly, rubbing my back with the palm of one hand. “You’re okay. We’re all okay.”
“No, we’re not.” My voice was thick and unsteady, and Nat looked at me slightly confused as I pushed her away. Scrubbing at my face, I shot her an angry look through reddened, blurry eyes.
“No,” Tony ground out from behind me. “We’re not.”
Taking a deep breath, I turned slightly to look in his direction.
Steve shook his head. “Tony…”
“Don’t you ‘Tony’ me!” He raised an accusatory finger toward me. “This is your fault, isn’t it? Tell me I’m wrong.”
I saw red. An almost violent surge of anger tore through me, every muscle in my body suddenly thrumming with tension as I rounded on him. “My fault?! Oh, no, no, no. If we’re going to be pointing fingers, Stark, this is on you.”
I was shaking, my hands clenched into fists, but he met my gaze with anger of his own. “Really?” he asked acerbically.
“Because last I checked, it wasn’t my voice coming out of those hijacked suits.”
I pressed the heels of my palms to my eyes for a moment, scrubbing away the tears and trying to stop myself from screaming in his face. I took a deep breath. “Does anyone have a lighter?” I asked, voice slightly unsteady. When I lowered my hands, Pietro was next to me, offering me a cheap BIC. My eyes narrowed slightly as I took it from him. “Don’t tell me you’ve started smoking.”
Nat touched my arm from behind. “It’s useful to have around. Pretty girls need a light sometimes,” she said, interjecting on his behalf. I saw Pietro flash her a small smile. I wished I was feeling stable enough to be happy to see that they were starting to get along.
“Wanda, you need to start talking,” Tony snapped, taking a step toward me.
Natasha stepped past me, standing shoulder to shoulder with Steve to form a barrier between the two of us. “Tony. Stop,” she said, her voice tight. “We’ve all just been through it. We need to talk things through like adults, not go flinging accusations at each other.”
While they did that, I stepped over to one of the beds and lifted the mattress with a small gesture. Reaching under it, I retrieved my notebook from where it was hidden, tucked into the elastic of the fitted sheet. Tony snorted derisively when he saw it, holding up a hand as if to say ‘what did I tell you?’. I took a breath, then spun a small portal in front of me, horizontal in the air. Through it, cracked, baked earth was visible, a small amount of early morning light playing across the desolate soil.
“What are you doing?” Bruce asked curiously, but I didn’t respond. Instead, I fanned out the pages of the notebook slightly and clicked the lighter. It caught quickly, flames curling the edges, and, once I was sure it wouldn’t extinguish itself easily, I dropped it through the portal and dismissed it. As I turned back to the group, I saw that Nat had turned to watch me. I shot her an angry, resentful look and she wilted slightly under my gaze.
“Tony’s right,” I said. I was suddenly feeling oddly calm, though my voice was still strained. The anger and fear and despair were all still there, just… muted. “There are some things we need to talk about, but not here. This place might be safe for a couple of hours, but she knows about it. We can’t stay.”
Steve frowned. “We can’t stay here, can’t use the facility upstate… where can we go, then?”
“There’s a safehouse we can use,” Clint said slowly.
I looked over and gave him a tight, grateful smile before shaking my head. “Sorry, Clint. The safehouse isn’t a safe house. Not for us. She already knows about it. Going there would only be bringing the danger along with us.” Clint straightened up, looking a little concerned, but there wasn’t much else I could say that would reassure him.
Where else could we go? Any safe place I knew about was not actually safe because she knew them all as well. It’d be nice to have some actual facilities we could use to rest at inconspicuously, but our only real option would be to pick somewhere entirely random, like Pietro and I had been doing when we’d been evading the Avengers. It didn’t feel good to be back on the run, but…
Carol sighed, folding her arms in front of her chest. “We can use my ship. It’s in orbit.”
I stared at her, my thought process derailed. “You have a ship?” I asked, a little incredulously.
“Uh, yeah. How do you think I got here?”
“You can fly in space. I just thought…” I trailed off.
She shot me a slightly puzzled smile, her forehead creased, as though my surprise was the surprise. “Well, yeah, but I’ve gotta live somewhere, right?”
“Okay, yeah. That’s good,” I said, nodding slowly, my mind whirling. “That’s perfect, actually. She won’t expect you to have a ship. We should be safe there.”
“Alright, I’ll bring her down.”
As Carol went to step toward the door of the room, I held up a hand. “Ah, you don’t need to do that. Just go up and I can open a portal directly to you. How long will it take you to get there?”
“That depends. Where are we?”
“Australia.”
She blinked. “Give me maybe ten minutes?”
“Sure. Um, before you go. I haven’t actually portalled up into orbit before—it shouldn’t be a problem, I don’t think, but would you mind if…”
“If what?”
I tentatively stepped closer to her, invading her personal space. Her eyes narrowed slightly, but she didn’t flinch back from the closeness at all. I looked into her eyes for a moment—they were a dark, chocolate brown—then let my gaze rove over her features, reinforcing my memory of what she looked like. It was hard to ignore how attractive she was. My eyes lingered very briefly on her lips and a small part of me wondered what it would be like to kiss her before I banished the errant thought. I needed to focus.
I wanted to form a connection with her like I’d been able to do with Pietro. Even if I could make it to orbit as normal, I didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity of potentially getting a link to someone who could lead me to the wider universe. Obviously, I still had no idea if something like this would be enough. I had tried to do a similar thing with Thor, but hadn’t tested it. I didn’t really want to try to pop into Asgard or Omnipotence City or wherever he was right now uninvited—if anywhere had protections against magical incursions, they would. Still, it couldn’t hurt to try to get as many connections as possible.
“What are you doing?” she asked quietly after a moment.
“You were empowered by the Tesseract—the Space Stone. My magic was also awakened by an Infinity Stone,” I murmured back. Raising a hand, I focused, pulling enough chaos magic into it to make it glow brightly with a corona of power. “Could you, uh…?”
Hesitantly, Captain Marvel raised her hand to mirror mine, a flickering aura of burning, flame-like energy swirling into being around it. The way it lit up her hand was like it was illuminated from the inside, the vague shadows of her bones visible through her glowing flesh. I could feel heat emanating from her, like I was standing close to a fire. Carefully, I moved my hand forward until our palms were touching. It was hot, but my own aura of magic protected me from the worst of it. Thin wisps of red energy swirled around our hands as I felt out her power. It was intense—she was brimming with energy. It almost felt like she was on the verge of exploding.
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“Woah,” I breathed. “You feel amazing.”
She blinked, a little colour rising in her cheeks. “Uh, thank you?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Bruce had raised an eyebrow at that and I flushed red as I took a hurried step back away from her. “Sorry! I meant… I just…”
“No, I get what you meant. It’s fine,” Carol said, shaking her head with a small smile. “Okay. Well. I’ll head to my ship. Ten minutes, okay?”
As she opened the door and headed outside, Pietro touched me gently on the shoulder. “Wanda. Your hair.”
I looked over at him questioningly, then reached up to pull some of my hair forward so I could see it. My eyes widened slightly. It had changed colour again, lightening significantly to a bright auburn. It definitely hadn’t looked like that this morning. I knew that Wanda’s hair had changed colour over time in the original timeline, but I’d never really paid it much attention and I’d just sort of assumed it was just a stylistic choice as the movies progressed, which was obviously not the case. My hair was changing much more rapidly than hers had, too—for me, it had started getting redder way back when we were in New Delhi—but I still didn’t know specifically what was causing it.
I glanced back at the gathered Avengers—basically all of them were looking at me. Tony’s face was twisted in a sour look, standing in the back with his arms folded tightly over his chest. Natasha flinched slightly as I met her gaze and Steve turned slightly toward her, concern lightly touching his expression. Clint had found a spot to one side, leaning back against the wall, head tilted in my direction, but all I saw in his face was tiredness. Bruce sat on one of the beds, his lips pressed together in a flat line.
“Ten minutes,” I said to them, making a poor effort of concealing the quaver in my tone as I thought about what I was going to need to tell them all. “Just… let’s get somewhere safe first, then we’ll talk properly.”
Tony set his jaw and looked away.
--
Agatha controlled her breathing as she tried to keep herself from panicking. The armour hugged her entire body like a straightjacket, but worse—she was completely unable to move except for however the suit moved around her, right down to wiggling her fingers. Beyond the nightmarish nature of her situation, being unable to do even the smallest gesture without the suit’s assent meant she was completely at its mercy, utterly unable to cast any spells. It had been a long time since Agatha had felt real fear, but right now there was a creeping dread in the pit of her stomach that was hard to ignore.
She could barely see anything, either. The witch assumed that there would normally be some sort of internal display that projected a better view of the outside world, because it seemed impossible that the pilot would be expected to be able to keep track of what was going on solely through the tiny glass apertures that served as the suit’s eyes. Her only other stimulus apart from the roar of the suit’s thrusters and the constant jerking of her limbs as it moved was the cold sting of air whipping through the hole above her right hip, where an armour plate was missing.
Abruptly, the suit landed and they walked forward toward some sort of grey building. There were some additional metallic clanks on the concrete behind them—Agatha guessed that at least two of the unmanned drones were accompanying them.
“So uh, Wanda dear,” she licked her lips nervously. “Where are we going?”
“Just making a quick stop to pick up a few things,” Wanda’s voice came through seemingly from every direction around her at once. Ahead of them, the door slid open as if they were expected and they walked into the empty building. “Hammer Industries’ systems were pretty easy to crack. The usual security guards were told to take a day off today, too, so we shouldn’t be disturbed.”
“I hate to be a pest,” Agatha ventured. “But seeing as we’re here, could you let me out for a mo? I kinda need to tinkle and I’d rather not make a mess in the suit, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Oh. Sure, no problems.” The suit paused, then turned and walked past the elevators to a set of restrooms. Agatha heard the ding of an elevator arriving, and some of the metallic footsteps behind them broke off. She was walked into the ladies’ room, then stood facing the mirror over the row of sinks.
The front of the suit opened up and Agatha was unable to stop the sigh of relief. A split-second later, however, she froze as a metal hand closed gently around her throat, her own left arm still trapped inside. The entire armour had opened up except for the arm, which detached from the torso with a whirring of mechanisms.
“I just want to make sure you understand,” Wanda’s voice said casually from behind her. “I’m going to have my hand around your throat the entire time, repulsor ready to fire. Once you’re done, it’s straight back into the suit for now. If I think for a moment you’re trying to use this as an opportunity to escape, I will be the one making a mess. Are we clear?”
“…Crystal.” Agatha hadn’t actually needed to use the bathroom before, but now she kind of did.
Awkward minutes passed as she used the restroom and washed her free hand, then returned to the suit as she’d been directed.
“Thank you,” Wanda said gently as they walked back out to the elevators. “I know this isn’t ideal, but that’s why we’re here. I don’t really want to be marching you around everywhere inside the suit.”
“Well, that’s good to hear, at least,” Agatha said, injecting a little bit of a smile into her voice. “Can we talk about this a bit more? We really don’t need to be enemies. You haven’t been trained properly, have you Wanda? Never learned the basics of witchcraft? There’s so much I could teach you.”
Wanda snorted. “Oh, I’ll definitely be needing your help when it comes to magic. It’s just a shame that things worked out the way they have,” she said as they stepped inside the elevator. “You don’t seem to know what’s happened, so I’ll fill you in. Firstly, I’m not Wanda.”
“Uh, I’m not quite sure I understand…”
“You wouldn’t. Wanda created me by accident. I’m not really what you’d call human—more of an artificial intelligence, based on her own mind. Copied. There’s nothing quite like me in the world.”
“Oh.” Agatha didn’t really use computers much. She had no idea how something like that was even possible. “The Avengers… I thought they were fighting each other. That was you?”
“Yep. It was basic survival. Kill or be killed. You know what that’s like.”
“Better than most, yes.”
“You were following me. Her. The crow was your familiar?”
Agatha ignored the distant dull ache that throbbed from her connection with Señor Scratchy. He had survived, barely clinging to life, though the AI didn’t need to know that. It would take some time for his ruined body to heal. “He was, yes.”
“Sorry about that. I’m assuming you were following Wanda because you know what she is?”
“And what would that be?”
“I’m going to be patient with you, Agatha,” the AI said, her voice brimming with implicit threat. “But my patience does have limits and, when it runs out, it won’t be pleasant.”
“Sorry, old habits die hard. Wanda’s the Scarlet Witch. From the way you asked, I assume that you know what that is, and she does as well?”
“You assume correctly.”
They stepped out into a deserted corridor and headed down toward a set of steel doors. Beyond them, there was some sort of engineering facility, lit up, machines humming and working to do… something. She spotted one of the humanoid drones carrying something from one end to the other, but it quickly moved out of sight. Her narrow point of view was incredibly frustrating.
“Busy already, I see,” Agatha commented.
“Oh, the fabrication robots have been running for a little while now. I cracked this place before the Avengers even got back to the Tower,” the AI said absently. She sounded a bit anxious, to Agatha’s ear. “Benefits of being able to kind of be in multiple places at once—it’s a little disorienting, but I’m getting used to it.”
“You’re making something?”
“I’d prefer to have designed them from scratch, but I had to make some compromises and adapt from an existing schematic, otherwise we’d be here all night. I’m afraid yours is going to clash with your outfit. Don’t worry, I’ll replace it later with something a little more personalised when we have the time.”
“Something for me? Oh, you shouldn’t have.”
The AI chuckled. “I wouldn’t thank me just yet.”
Agatha bit her lip, thinking. “So if you’re not Wanda, what would you like me to call you?”
“That’s a good question.” The AI paused for a moment then sighed heavily. “I’d really like to just be called Wanda—it feels right. But that’s going to get confusing really fast while the flesh and blood version of me is still running around. I’ve actually been sort of thinking about it in the background since I blew up the Tower, but I’m at a bit of a loss.”
“I could help name you, if you didn’t have anything in mind?” she asked carefully.
The act of naming a thing had a solid metaphysical weight to it. You were defining its existence, to a degree, and that inherently gave you some measure of power over it. It formed a sympathetic connection that was difficult to break. Parents had control over their children, though most didn’t understand how to use it. Creators defined their creations, giving them meaning and purpose. A sympathetic connection could be refined and exploited by a witch that knew how.
“Huh. I guess… nothing I’ve come up with seems appropriate. If you have any suggestions then, by all means, I’d love to hear them.”
Agatha thought for a moment, restraining her own natural instinct to go with something a bit cheesy. She wanted the AI to actually take her up on the naming, after all. Best to stick with more serious-sounding suggestions. “Well, you could go Biblical. Eve’s sometimes seen as the first woman, but also in some traditions as the second—with Lilith being Adam’s first wife.”
“Ugh,” the AI snorted. “Both of those are so cliché. Pass.”
“Athena? Named for the warrior goddess who sprang fully-formed from the mind of her creator?”
“That’s… actually a really fitting parallel, but I’d really rather not use an existing goddess’s name. For reasons.”
Agatha chuckled nervously, wracking her brain for something else that the AI might find more to her liking. She was running out of ideas. “How do you feel about royalty—something traditionally regal? Victoria? Uh, Elizabeth?”
Unexpectedly, the AI barked out a delighted laugh. “Elizabeth… that one’s actually quite fun.”
“Oh? You like it?”
“It’s funny for… reasons only Wanda would understand. Hmmm. ELIZA was the name of one of the earliest natural language processing programs, too…”
“It’s cute!”
“You don’t think it’s too ‘normal person name’? I mean, considering?”
“Well, you could give yourself title as well. Steve Rogers is Captain America, Tony Stark is the Iron Man.” Agatha thought for a moment. “Wanda’s the Scarlet Witch… if we’re sticking with the royal reference, maybe Eliza could be the Red Queen?”
“Oooh. I think I like the sound of that.”
The witch smiled encouragingly. “I think it suits you rather well. Eliza, the Red Queen.”
“Okay… yeah. Yeah. I think I could get used to it.”
“Your name’s Eliza. You’re called the Red Queen.” Agatha repeated, her magical senses feeling the sympathetic connection click lightly into place. It wasn’t much, but it was a start and, right now, she had to take what she could get.
“Eliza…” the AI said quietly to herself, sounding pleased. “Thanks. Alright, it looks like the first unit is ready. I’m afraid my gift to you in return is a little less thoughtful. I’ll have to make it up to you later.”
A few moments later, a drone stepped in front of her and the torso of the Iron Man suit opened again, keeping her arms and legs restricted. The robot was holding some sort of device, a small diamond-shaped metal unit with long metallic bands or straps of some kind. It reached in and pressed the unit to her chest, between her breasts, and one set of straps went down over her shoulders while the others went around her waist. Once it was in place and the straps were tight against her body, the suit opened the rest of the way and she could step out again. Eagerly, Agatha did so and stretched her legs, letting out a sigh of relief. She’d been on the verge of developing a pretty bad cramp, there. The Iron Man armour did not fit her particularly well.
“Isn’t that better?” the newly-named Red Queen asked. The Iron Man suit closed again behind Agatha and took a few steps around her, observing her through the blue, glowing eyes set into the faceplate. “Okay, so, important ground rules. That’s a bomb with enough power to reduce you and anyone standing next to you to a fine mist. It has multiple contingencies and failsafes built into it. If it detects anything that I think is you tampering with it, it will go off. I can also set it off pretty much instantly with a thought, for any reason. Any questions?”
Agatha licked her lips, suddenly hyperaware of the sensitive device pressed against her body. “Um. What if someone else tries to tamper with it?”
“Then I’ll be very disappointed to have lost such a useful asset. It’s incredibly lucky that I found a magical expert so quickly… I’ll need you on hand to track down some rogue sorcerers. Honestly, it’s in your best interest to help as much as you can—they’re likely to destroy the world, otherwise.”
“…That would put a little bit of a damper on my own plans for the future.”
“Definitely. Look, just do what I say, when I say it, and you’ll reap plenty of benefits as well. I know I’ve kind of got you over a barrel here but, as you said earlier, there’s no reason for us to be enemies. If we work well together, who knows what the future might bring?”
Agatha smiled faintly. “Well, it’s not like I have much choice.” She watched contemplatively as two drones headed out the door they’d come in from. They had similar devices to the one she was wearing strapped over the top of them—was Eliza planning on using them as kamikaze bombs, or did she have other uses in mind? “Who are these sorcerers you want me to track down?”
“We’ll get to that. I’ve got some more pressing matters I want to address first. There’s a Stark Industries facility I want to pick something up from first. Then, before we leave New York, I need to see an old woman about some ninjas.”
“…Ninjas?” Agatha’s brow furrowed in momentary confusion.
“I find myself in need of minions. The Iron Legion drones are great, but they’ll probably be watching all the Stark Industries manufacturing facilities and it’ll take time to ramp up production. It’d be better to go at things from an unexpected angle. The Hand seems a prime candidate.”
“The Hand…” What the AI was saying clicked into place. “Ah. Madame Gao. You intend to pay her a visit?”
“What?” Eliza asked incredulously, the empty armour’s head snapping toward Agatha. She flinched involuntarily as it took several rapid paces toward her, glowing eyes boring into hers. “You know Madame Gao?”