“I’m going to say this once.” Steve said, a threatening edge to his tone. He had his shield in his hand and his expression was thunderous.

Though I knew he had his flaws—he was only human, after all—I’d always seen Steve as essentially a paragon of moral virtue and the way he was looking at us right now made me want to crawl into a hole and die. That look was enough to shake my conviction far more than any argument anyone had made earlier, though I took a deep breath and steeled myself in the face of it.

Tony, on the other hand, seemed almost completely unbothered. “How about ‘none-ce’?” he quipped, glancing only briefly up from his work.

“Stop what you’re doing.” Steve set his jaw stubbornly, taking a step forward. He stood at the head of a group of the others; Bruce, Bucky, Clint and Carol were all behind him, their expressions similarly grim. When they’d arrived, Pietro had been with them as well—it had taken him a moment longer to catch on, so he’d just looked confused at first, but once he’d twigged to what was going on he’d hastily distanced himself a little bit from Steve’s group. Killmonger was standing next to Tony, though he remained studiously quiet as he watched the interplay between the Avengers. Shuri, on the other hand, hadn’t even looked up.

“Nope, not gonna happen,” Tony said dismissively.

“Captain…” T’Challa’s tone had a note of warning in it as he stepped forward, interposing himself slightly between Steve’s group and the team that was working on the AI. “I remind you that you are not in charge here.”

“Tony, come on man, stop,” Bruce pleaded as he stepped hesitantly forward, angling to move past T’Challa. He held his hands up in a non-threatening gesture, trying to sidle past as the Wakandan prince glowered at him. After a second, T’Challa relented and let him cross the invisible line that had been drawn.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Steve said. “After everything that’s happened…”

“Everything that’s happened?” asked Tony sarcastically, finally stopping work to glare at him across the room. “Do I need to remind you what’s happened? There’s a mad AI on the loose that keeps trying to kill us and we’ve been scrambling for solutions with one hand tied behind our backs. We gotta be realistic about our chances here, and start taking some risks.”

“Steve, please,” the new AI spoke up. Her voice had improved dramatically—she kept a faint electronic tone to it, which clearly differentiated her from me and Eliza, but otherwise she still sounded very much like me. Clint and Bucky exchanged alarmed looks as she spoke. “There’s nothing to stop. It’s already done.”

Steve shot me a disbelieving look. “You actually went ahead and did it. You created another one.” I turned away slightly, wilting under his gaze, unable to meet it directly. So this is what it felt like to have Captain America be disappointed in you. Thanks, I hate it.

The AI couldn’t really see what was happening—her viewpoint was limited to what could be captured via the Kimiyo bead that was plugged into the interface—but she spoke up again, seemingly sensing my discomfort. “It’s okay, Steve. It’s fine. I’m fine. Tony and Shuri are putting in a failsafe,” she said. “I’ll fight Eliza and, if I lose, then at the very least I can try to take her down with me.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Steve’s expression somehow darken even further, hands tightening into fists. He moved, trying to bull forward, his shield hefted in one hand, but T’Challa didn’t back down. Instead, he stepped in to block him directly, facing the American with a hard expression. Steve paused, sizing the prince up, and Bucky and Carol stepped up beside him, the latter flaring faintly—but noticeably enough to be threatening—with burning energy.

While I knew that T’Challa was stubborn enough that the threat of a fight with all three of them probably still wouldn’t make him back down, I still summoned wisps of red chaos magic to my hands and stepped up beside him, facing Carol. I flashed her an apologetic look and she cocked her head to the side, lips compressed in a thin line. T’Challa shifted slightly, moving fractionally further away from me, and I had to suppress the sudden desire to roll my eyes. Pietro hadn’t physically come over to interpose himself, but he’d straightened up, bouncing on his heels, and seemed ready to intervene if needed. I really, really didn’t want an actual fight to break out over this, but if they didn’t back down… This plan would work. I knew it would. I couldn’t let them stop us.

“They want to put a bomb in your head and send you off to die fighting her,” Steve said, raising his voice slightly to address the AI. “This isn’t right. You don’t have to do this.”

“I said it’s fine, Steve,” she said, a little bit of irritation creeping into her tone. “I want to do this. I need to.”

“It’s suicide. We don’t trade lives.”

I took a deep breath, glancing toward Steve. I needed to talk—the AI was already under a lot of stress and pressure. The least I could do is step in so she didn’t have to deal with arguing with Captain America, too. “Steve, you are the biggest hypocrite sometimes. I bet you weren’t thinking ‘we don’t trade lives’ when you went into the fucking ice, were you? It’s fine for you to sacrifice yourself to save the people you care about, but not for her?”

“That was different,” he shook his head. “There was no time for anything else. I didn’t have any other options.”

“We don’t have any other options here, either.”

“You made a person,” Steve raised his voice so that he could address the AI directly again. “I know it doesn’t sound nice for me to say that they shouldn’t have created you in the first place but, now that you’re here, we’re not just going to throw your life away.”

“Either I am a person, with the capacity to give consent—in which case I do—or I’m not actually a person and it’s fine to do whatever,” The AI responded. “You can’t have it both ways, Steve. I either have agency or I don’t. You’re too used to getting away with treating Wanda like a kid. I can make my own decisions.”

There was a bit of a silent stand-off for a few moments. Carol was eyeing me appraisingly and I realised she was weighing up how powerful she thought I was. She’d seen me use my powers a few times now, but we’d never sparred or fought. She knew that I had a good idea of exactly how strong she was, yet I had still stepped up to face her without any real nervousness, which she would assume meant that I thought I could restrain or beat her. In reality, I had no idea who would actually win if it came down to it. I knew I could theoretically beat her, given what Wanda did to the Illuminati version of Maria Rambeau, but I wasn’t quite at that level yet and, when it came down to it, even with the Heart-Shaped Herb’s enhancement I was much more physically fragile than Carol was.

Steve looked around the room. His eyes eventually settled on Natasha, who was standing off to one side. She’d kept quiet, just watching the exchange without taking a clear side, though she didn’t look happy. “Nat, don’t tell me you’re supporting this, too?”

She averted her eyes, looking at the floor sullenly. “I’m not happy about it, either. But it’s out of my hands.”

“Tony,” Bruce grimaced. “We’re not really doing this, are we?” He’d made his way over to stand beside the other man as he talked, moving to put himself in Tony’s field of view.

Tony stopped what he was doing and turned to face him properly, reaching over to put a hand on his shoulder. “This is it. Our Hail Mary shot. I need you with me on this, buddy.”

“I don’t…”

“We’ve got this, okay? We’re at the cutting edge of mad science here. Maybe it makes us monsters, I don’t know. All I know is we gotta make a stand. Fight back. Can I count on you to fight with me?” He squeezed Bruce’s shoulder, looking him in the eye. The scientist vacillated, fidgeting and looking like he was torn between throttling Tony and bursting into tears, but after a moment he nodded quietly. One down.

“Come on, Carol,” I said quietly. “Stand down. There’s no point in fighting over this. It’s already done.”

She looked at me for a few more moments, then straightened slightly and let the burning manifestation of her power disperse. “You really think you could take me?” she asked, cocking her head to the side slightly, a hint of genuine curiosity in her tone.

I grinned, feeling some of the tension deflate, and lowered my voice a little more, looking at her questioningly. “…You mean in a fight, right?” I asked. Carol gave a long-suffering sigh in response, the faint ghost of a smile flickering across her features.

Steve looked across at us, noting that Carol had seemingly eased off, and shook his head. “I might not be able to stop you, but that doesn’t mean I can be part of this,” he said, anger and disappointment warring in his tone. He looked down for a moment, then turned on his heel and started walking away. Bucky shot me a disappointed look of his own before turning and hurrying off after Steve, while Clint moved off to the side of the room to link up with Natasha.

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Carol glanced from me to T’Challa. “Nice to see the two of you getting along, at least,” she said mildly.

T’Challa stiffened and exhaled sharply through his nose before turning and stalking off. I let out a little sigh as I watched him head over to check on his sister. Shuri, of course, had been so deeply absorbed in her work that she’d basically ignored the entire confrontation. Not far from them, Tony and Killmonger had already started walking Bruce through the structure of the AI’s base code. That hadn’t gone well, but it had still probably gone as well as could be expected. I needed to talk to Steve again, try to talk him around when the situation was less dramatically charged, but for now it was probably better to give him a bit of time and space to cool off.

“Come on,” I said, glancing back at Carol. “I’ll introduce you to Wanda-3.”

--

“I don’t know how you could just stand there and let her do something like that,” Bucky said, his face twisted in a frown as he leaned back against the wall, arms folded in front of him. He looked tired as well as angry—dark circles under his eyes betraying his lack of sleep over the last few days.

With the science portion of the team otherwise occupied with Wanda-3, most of the remaining Avengers had retreated to their temporary living quarters. While the rest of them milled about in the hallway, Steve had excused himself and stepped into his room, seeming to want to be alone for a bit, which was fine—Natasha was already having enough trouble with Bucky and Clint, she didn’t really want to have to wrangle Steve as well right now.

“Firstly, what was I supposed to do? She’d already made up her mind and she can put the Hulk in time out. There was nothing I could have done,” Nat said, trying not to let too much frustration leak into her tone. She let out a sigh. “Secondly, she’s not a child, Bucky. I didn’t ‘let’ her do anything. She can make her own decisions.”

“Bad decisions,” Clint said, unhelpfully.

Nat shot him an annoyed look. “Yeah, because we’ve never made bad decisions of our own.”

“That’s exactly why you should have stepped in,” insisted Bucky, unfolding his arms and gesturing to punctuate his statement. “We know what it’s like to end up regretting our actions. What’s the point, if we can’t stop the people we care about from making the same mistakes? If you’d stood in front of her and told her she couldn’t do it, she might have listened to you. If this goes bad…”

“Yeah, I know what it’s like,” Nat scoffed. “I know what it’s like to feel like you have to do something. I know what it’s like to regret it, and feel guilty about it, but to still know it had to be done and that you made the right call at the time. Even if other people don’t see it that way.”

Clint shook his head, a pensive expression on his face. “She went to a guy literally called Killmonger for help. I don’t know, Nat. There had to be a better way to do this.”

“You know that’s not always true,” Nat said. She was starting to get frustrated—she hadn’t even agreed with Wanda’s decision yet, somehow, she had ended up here defending it. “Sometimes there is no better way. Tony and Shuri are the experts here and they hadn’t come up with anything better. Wanda keeps having her agency taken out from under her. If we just stopped her without a workable alternative to offer, she’d resent it forever.”

“You just didn’t want her to resent you,” Bucky said accusingly.

Natasha flinched. “…Maybe that’s true,” she allowed, taking a deep breath. “I’m allowed to be a little selfish sometimes, too.”

“Sorry,” Bucky said. His expression had softened slightly and, while his tone was a little sullen, there was genuine contrition there as well. “That wasn’t warranted.”

As he spoke, Nat picked up the barely perceptible sound of quiet footsteps approaching from around the corner. All three of them quieted and straightened, exchanging wary glances. Clint’s hand went to the collapsed bow hidden at his back. Everyone had been on edge since Eliza’s attack on the Great Mound, but it had the three of them in particular jumping at shadows. All in silent accord, they watched the corner together, waiting for whoever it was to show themselves.

A few seconds later, Wanda turned around the corner and froze, caught off-guard and clearly not expecting the three of them to just be standing there silently waiting for her arrival. “Uh, hi.” Nat felt her shoulders relax slightly. Off to the side, Clint huffed a small sigh and moved his hand away from his bow. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt… is Steve around? I wanted to talk to him.”

“Steve’s busy,” Bucky snapped. Wanda flinched slightly at his tone, her shoulders drooping. He caught himself, expression softening again as he shook his head. “Sorry. It’s just… everything’s a bit tense right now.”

“I know. It’s my fault. Everyone’s angry with me,” Wanda said, still looking a bit small and wilted. “I can come back later if it’d be better.”

Nat caught Bucky’s attention and shot him a pleading look before glanced back at Wanda. “He’s just in his room,” she said, gesturing toward the door. “I don’t think he’d mind if you knocked.”

Bucky grunted noncommittally, which Wanda cautiously took as assent. She stepped past, eyes downcast, and knocked lightly on the door. There were a few seconds of silence, then Steve called out from behind the door, his voice muffled by the barrier but raised enough to be heard. “Come in.”

--

I stepped into the room, the door sliding shut behind me. Steve was—oddly enough—kneeling by the side of the bed, leaning back a bit, his arms hanging by his sides as he looked over toward me with an unreadable expression on his face.

It took me a second to realise why he was on the floor. When I did, I blinked in surprise. “Oh. Were you… praying?”

A small, slightly sad smile quirked the corner of his mouth. “I’m guessing you don’t believe in God.”

“Uh, no. Not the Christian one, at least,” I said, feeling even more off-balance than I’d expected to when I’d walked in. “My visions showed me a lot about the divine aspects of the universe and uh, let’s just say I wasn’t very impressed.” Of course Steve prays. Why did I find that surprising at all? Just because they’d never shown him do it in any of the movies? Stupid.

“Were you religious before that?” he asked. He looked tired, but there was a touch of genuine curiosity in his tone.

“Well, no. I didn’t believe before either, I guess,” I said with a shrug.

Steve nodded slowly to himself, as if I’d just confirmed something he’d already guessed. “Some things you’ve just got to take on faith.”

I shot him a hopeful smile. “That’s a great point, you definitely do,” I said, trying to inject a bit of lightness into my tone. “So I’m hoping it won’t be too much to ask you to have a little bit of faith in me, as well?”

“Wanda…” he looked at me searchingly for a moment, then slowly rose to his feet so he could face me properly. “I’m really disappointed in you. I hoped you’d learned a lesson or two from everything else that’s happened.”

I swallowed the lump in my throat that had suddenly appeared. My chest felt tight. I’d known when I’d made my decision that Steve would be upset, but knowing it was coming and experiencing it were two very different things.

“Well, I seem to spend basically all of my time pissing Tony off and I thought you might be feeling left out.” He didn’t smile at the joke, which made me feel even worse. Maybe Eliza was onto something when she said I was desperate for the Avengers’ approval. “Look, Steve, I’m sorry, okay? I know you weren’t on board with this, but it was the only plan we had with a decent chance of success.”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. You can’t just act unilaterally like that, Wanda. It should have been a team decision.”

I clenched my fists, my anxiety easing a little as a flash of anger passing through me instead. “Right,” I said, letting a bitter edge of sarcasm leak into my tone. “Sorry, I forgot, it’s only okay when someone acts unilaterally when it restricts me in some way. I’m not allowed to do things.”

Steve set his jaw, looking at me stubbornly. “You still have the Mind Stone, don’t you?”

He thought he was making a good point, but the underlying implication—one I wasn’t even sure he realised he was making—only served to make me angrier. “I have it because it’s mine. Not because you’re graciously allowing me to keep it.”

Steve blinked, then shook his head. “Wanda… that’s not what I meant.”

I made a slashing gesture with my hand and almost snarled at him. “Oh, come off it, Steve. That’s exactly what you meant. I am so, so sick to death of you treating me like a fucking child. It at least made a little bit of sense the first time around, but not now. I’m older than you. My body might be younger than yours, but I’ve experienced more.” I said, my voice low and clipped. I was trying to moderate my tone, but this was the best I could do right now—it was either this or start shouting at him. “I’ve never seen you talk to Tony or Nat or Bucky the way you talk to me. Would you ever start a conversation with any of them saying how disappointed you were in them? Like they were a little kid you’d caught misbehaving?”

For a moment I thought Steve was going to argue, his jaw working silently for a couple of seconds, but then he looked down and took a deep breath. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’ve been so focused on other things that I didn’t notice I was doing it.” He looked back up at me, meeting my gaze. “I’ll try to be better about that.”

And now I was off-balance again, my righteous anger utterly deflating. I’d expected him to deny it, or to say that I was acting like a child, or, well, basically anything other than that. An apology, self-reflection and a commitment to be better moving forward? Ugh, Steve was just so… perfect all of the time. It made me want to punch him in his stupid mouth a little bit.

“Well… good. Thank you,” I said awkwardly, instead. “So can we please just… move on? What’s done is done. We can’t un-create Wanda-3. Well, we could, but I’m pretty sure you’d agree that’d be murder.”

“You still should have done this differently, rather than going to N'Jadaka behind everyone’s backs,” he said with a sigh. “If you’d talked to people individually, gotten them on board, then brought it up as a team again. We could have discussed it more.”

I let out a small, sad laugh. “You keep saying ‘as a team’, but I’ve never been part of the team, have I? Not really. Between Tony restricting my access and rifling through my things, you treating me like you have been… even Nat went behind my back.” I felt my face growing hot and pressed the palms of my hands against my eyes for a moment, willing myself under control. I felt like if I started crying here, I wouldn’t be able to stop. “I keep trying and trying and trying, but nothing I do seems to stick. How could I trust that this time, it’d be different? That this time, you’d actually listen to me properly? None of you would have trusted me enough to do this.”

“Wanda… I’m sorry. I had no idea you felt that way,” Steve said slowly. “But being part of a team extends both ways. We still could have talked it through properly. Maybe we could have done it with someone else.”

“Not with the same potential for success, win or lose,” I countered. “I already told you; I can’t imagine her assimilating an AI based on any one of you, and she’d never expect another copy of me to willingly go on a suicide mission to stop her.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I don’t know it for certain,” I admitted, a little annoyed again. “But I do know Eliza. I know how her mind works better than anyone else. She was literally made from me, remember?”

“But she’s not you,” he said. “You’re better than she is.”

“And that’s exactly why I needed to do this.”

There was a beat where we just stared at each other, neither willing to concede ground. “…I want to talk to her,” Steve said finally. “Alone.”

I sighed. “You’re not going to be able to talk her out of it.”

He set his jaw again, his stubbornness flaring up. “Maybe not. That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try.”