Seven months earlier…
“Wanda, do you remember what we talked about yesterday?”
“Yes, Dr List. I’m sorry.”
“I trust we will see a better performance from you today?” The HYDRA scientist leaned in, invading my personal space, his piercing eyes boring into me. “I know you think you’re being kind, but the only thing you’re doing by holding back is hurting your own development.”
I kept my gaze fixed ahead, focusing on a point in space just to the right of his face as I resisted the urge to step back. “Yes, Dr List. I’ll try. I just… I worry I’ll kill someone.”
Dr List placed a hand on my shoulder and squeezed harder than he needed to. I schooled my features, trying to avoid wincing. “Wanda,” he said, his tone severe. “These men know what they signed up for. They are volunteers, just like you; here to change the world, just like you. You and your brother are our greatest successes so far. Don’t disrespect these men and their choices by wasting that.”
“Yes, Dr List.”
It was almost funny. Here I was, basically being given free rein to cut loose on people who’d signed on with HYDRA: actual, no joke modern Nazis. I’d always talked a big game about punching Nazis in my old life, but it turns out actually hurting people was a lot harder than I’d originally imagined it to be, especially when I knew just how easy it would be to misjudge a hit and accidentally kill someone.
He moved his hand from my shoulder to my chin, firmly moving my head so I had to look him in the eyes. My skin crawled. “You’ve never taken a life before. I know it can be hard, the first time. It will get easier. You just need practice.” Releasing me, he moved back around to the other side of the lab, sending his assistants scurrying with a wave of his hand. “Go on now.”
“What about Pietro?” I asked, looking around.
“You’ll be doing independent exercises today.” List peered over his glasses at me. “It’s important for you to be able to act separately should the need arise.”
“Oh.” I hesitated a moment, then stepped through the door to the courtyard, blinking in the bright sunlight. A half-dozen HYDRA thugs, kitted out in body armour and combat boots, were waiting for me at the other end.
The first couple of hours passed uneventfully. As usual, we ran through a variety of drills—hitting moving targets, avoiding being tagged, exercises to help train reflexes and heighten reaction speed. I’d only just started to learn to use my magic to shield myself, a development which Dr List had been particularly pleased with. We took a break, rested and rehydrated, then got back into it.
After we had finished going through the specific training drills the HYDRA scientists had devised to help teach me how to use my powers, we entered what List liked to call ‘free time’—a more free-form sparring session where my training partners would come at me however they liked, so that I could put my lessons into practice in something closer to a live combat situation. Several of the men I’d been training against were rotated out for fresh ones, and I had to dodge, shield myself from their attacks if I could, and tag them back with blasts of energy. Even when I was deliberately pulling my punches, most people struggled to keep pulling themselves to their feet after taking multiple hits from my chaos magic, so free time was usually the last thing we did in a day.
Injured thugs retreated from the courtyard through a steel door at the far end, one by one, once they managed to recover. The last one, however, lunged at me from the side before I’d had a chance to catch my breath from dealing with the previous two.
I turned, bringing up a hand, but wasn’t fast enough. My head snapped back as he backhanded me across the face, sending me stumbling back a few paces with a grunt of pain. I held up a hand—signalling for a time out—then bent forward and rested both hands on my knees for a moment, blinking away the spots in my vision. He’d hit me hard. That was going to bruise for sure.
I’d expected him to stop and wait for me to let him know when I was ready to continue, so was caught entirely by surprise when his booted feet appeared in my peripheral vision a split-second before his fist smashed solidly into my stomach, doubling me over. I folded and fell to the ground, hacking and wheezing, trying to get air back into my lungs. The HYDRA goon loomed over me and my eyes widened in panic as he cocked his foot back.
I barely managed to pull my arms in and curl up, trying desperately to protect my face and body as he started kicking me while I lay helpless. I let out a croaking yelp of pain as magic bubbled up inside me, reacting to my stress, and a weak wave of red energy swept out, only just barely enough to knock him away. He staggered back, but caught himself before he fell over. He chuckled. “That all you got, bitch?”
Rolling onto my belly, I scrabbled to get my hands and knees under me as I took a great, gulping gasp of air. “What the fuck are you doing?!” I choked out.
He started back toward me and I flung out an arm, sending a poorly-aimed bolt of red energy spiralling past his shoulder as he ducked in and kicked me again, his boot hitting me squarely in the side. I cried out again as a sharp spike of pain lanced through my body and I was sent tumbling along the ground.
“This isn’t… please… Dr List!”
“Continue.” Dr List’s voice rang out through the speaker on the wall above us.
The HYDRA thug walked over to where I lay on the ground, reaching down and grabbing a fistful of my hair. I screamed, clawing at his hand as he started dragging me. Kicking, I managed to get my feet under me, but he yanked me forward and threw me bodily against the solid stone of the fortress’s exterior wall.
Pain exploded across my shoulder, tears starting to cloud my vision. This wasn’t supposed to be happening! I winced as I tried to prop myself up against the wall and mostly failed. The thug came in close, trying to kick me while I was down again, and I flexed my fingers in his direction. A hastily-conjured bolt of chaos magic took him square in the chest, sending him tumbling away. I lay still for a few moments, exhausted, my breath coming in ragged gasps as I tried to work through the pain. Wiping my eyes with the back of my hand, I froze as the HYDRA thug groaned, dragging himself back to his feet. “You’re going to pay for that,” he hissed between his teeth.
My body shuddered in protest as I turned toward him, raising a hand shakily. He saw me and flung himself to the side, narrowly avoiding another bolt of energy. Recovering his footing, he started back toward me, a vicious scowl on his face.
The speaker crackled to life again. “He isn’t going to stop, Wanda. You know what you need to do.”
I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach as the pieces fell into place. Of course. This was all on purpose. All to make me ‘push through’ and stop holding back. The HYDRA thug lunged forward and kicked me again, stomping down on my unprotected head and arms—I managed to manifest a weak shield that took the worst of it, but it failed as he hit me again and again.
I flung up my hand—too close to avoid this time—and my power spread out across his body, red wisps of energy lifting the thug off his feet and into the air. He flailed for a moment, trying vainly to escape. I froze, my entire body shaking as I struggled to do anything more than take in short, shuddering breaths. I couldn’t see much more than a fuzzy blob outlined in red, my vision almost completed obscured by a mix of swelling, blood and tears.
Dr List’s voice cut through the ringing in my ears. “Do it, Wanda. End this.”
Trembling, I flicked my fingers, my power clawing and scrabbling at the thug as I brought up my other hand. He cried out in pain and sudden fear, yelling something I couldn’t understand. Focusing as best I could, I separated my magic into two separate forces, one gripping his hips and legs, the other his chest. I was feeling lightheaded, and some distant part of me was arguing with itself over whether I was having a panic attack or ‘only’ hyperventilating.
I pulled my fists apart and the man’s panicked cries were cut off by a horrific squelching noise. I buried my face in the crook of my arm, pressing my hands to my ears, but it was far too late to block out anything. The thunk of soggy meat hitting the cobblestone seared itself into my memories.
I collapsed onto my hands and knees—sobbing and hiccupping—and vomited.
--
Present day…
“Looks like we lucked out, boys and girls. Matsya Labs in New Delhi have a hit for us; the reading’s consistent with the sceptre’s signature.”
“We’ll turn around. ETA… eighty minutes. Do we have a location?”
“Within half a mile. Sending coordinates now—I’ll meet ya there.”
--
The Mind Stone floated in the air in front of me as I sat cross-legged on my bed, the gem suspended in wisps of chaos magic, its golden light almost entirely subsumed by my red. I was focused, my eyes closed, my mind probing it carefully but curiously.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
It was an Infinity Stone, a source of immense power, but when it came right down to it, I wasn’t sure how I should even be using it. Despite the risks of using it, the sceptre had at least been useful as an interface insofar as it had some pretty defined functions—tap or zap, basically. I’d originally hoped that the Ancient One would be able to help me create a new interface, maybe modelled on the Eye of Agamotto, but that was off the table for the foreseeable future. Using the stone raw was much more difficult. Faint, almost unnoticeable wisps of chaos magic crept through the hotel as I expanded my consciousness outward. There were 47 people currently in the small building, spread across 12 floors.
On the floor above us, thirteen-year-old Andy was teasing his little sister Stacey, having taken one of her toys away to taunt her with while their parents were oblivious in the next room. A stern thought from me and, suddenly, looking at the tears welling up in her eyes came with an extremely sharp pang of guilt, and he handed the doll back with a mumbled apology. Anil Sharma on the ground floor’s front desk was trying—and failing—to talk himself into confessing his feelings to Geeta when he saw her after work. They were childhood friends and he’d been in love with her for half his life. I gave him a push and felt his resolve crystalise, my influence shoring up his confidence. Three floors below me, Sunita and Manoj were locked together, rutting desperately, almost violently, before his brother—her fiancé—could return.
I withdrew, feeling both a voyeuristic thrill at the power and a little ashamed of the massive invasion of privacy I’d just committed. My already potent telepathic abilities were magnified considerably while using the stone, and I had no doubt at all that—were I so inclined—seizing complete control of a person’s mind and body would be almost too easy. The sceptre had posed a threat thanks to the conflict it deliberately drove you to, but the power the Mind Stone offered on its own was also dangerous in its own darkly seductive way.
Was it ethical to mind control people? Almost definitionally, no. Was it tempting to do when you had the power easily within your grasp? Incredibly.
I wasn’t sure what else to do with it, though. Its power could obviously be drawn out and used directly as a weapon—both the sceptre and Vision had been able to do that, though with Ultron averted I’d also ensured that he would never come to be either. The stone had also granted Vision the ability to phase through matter somehow, but that might’ve been a quirk of it interacting with his vibranium biology and I had no idea how to even start to try to replicate it.
The door to the bathroom opened and Pietro stepped out. “What did you do to your hair?” Pietro asked as he pulled on a fresh shirt.
“Hmm? My hair?” I opened my eyes and looked at him, dismissing the threads of chaos magic and letting the Mind Stone settle back into the palm of my hand.
Pietro just pointed at his head and waved his hand around, raising an eyebrow. Reaching back, I grabbed some of my hair and pulled it forward so I could see. Immediately, I understood why he’d asked. My hair was red. Not bright red, but noticeably redder—a dark auburn—instead of the chocolate brown it had been for the last twelve months. That was interesting.
“I didn’t do anything,” I shrugged, tucking my hair back behind my shoulder. “Might be because I’m more in tune with my magic, might be the stone itself… who knows?”
He looked at me for a moment, then nodded. “I like it.” A smile tugged at the corner of my mouth as he came over and sat on his bed, across from me. “Any luck with the ring?”
“Oh, yeah.” I retrieved the sling ring from my lap and put it on, focusing on a point in space just in front of me as a corona of red energy formed around my hand. After a few seconds of seating everything properly in my mind, I held up the ring-bearing hand and gestured with the other, the Mind Stone still clenched in my fist.
My initial examination of the ring had been basically spot on. I’d been concerned that it would be harder than it ended up actually being—like trying to run a Windows program on a Mac—but the relic really wasn’t worried about where the magical energy was coming from. I just fed power and intent into it, and it automatically ran through the complex ritual required to open a portal as if you were running an executable. A basketball-sized portal opened in the air just in front of me, its twin opening behind Pietro’s head. The spark-like threads of energy that encircled the portals were a bright crimson instead of the usual sorcerous orange, erratic wisps of chaos magic boiling off their edges, but they were otherwise identical to the portals we’d seen the Ancient One and her followers create.
I reached in, mussed Pietro’s hair, then laughed as he jumped almost a full foot in the air from the unexpected touch. He hopped off the bed again to evade my reach, then looked between the two portals with no small amount of wonder. “Okay, that’s pretty cool,” he admitted.
I grinned at him, dismissing the portals with a wave of my hand. “Yes, it is.”
“And we can go anywhere in the world with this?”
“Anywhere.”
He held his hands out. “Like say… New York? Avengers Tower?”
“Yes, like New York.” His eyes lit up and he started to smile. “But not just yet,” I finished, rolling my eyes at him.
Pietro sighed and collapsed back onto his bed. “Where, then?”
“Well, I was thinking Wakanda, but the sling ring opens up a lot of options for us. Hang on a sec.” Absently, I opened my hand and let the Mind Stone float up, nudging it with my magic to make it hover next to me before reaching down to pull out my notebook. Before I could open it, it vanished, yanked from my hands. “Hey!”
Looking as though he hadn’t moved at all, Pietro flipped the book open and started casting his eyes over the notes inside. “This is all you remember from your visions, right?”
I nodded. “Uh, yeah. As much as I could. Occasionally a little bit more detail comes back to me, but that’s basically everything.”
“You know I’ll follow your lead, but can we just talk things through a bit more?” He looked up at me, his expression serious. “First you wanted to go to Nepal, now you want to go to Wakanda. Why Wakanda? You said there are other options, what are they?”
I pursed my lips in a small moue of annoyance. “Give me my book.” Pietro rolled his eyes and handed it back to me. I clutched it protectively to my chest for a moment, glaring at him until I judged he had been sufficiently admonished, then opened it again and scanned the pages. “Honestly, I was thinking before anything else we need a base of operations. Somewhere we can secure as a safe location that we can portal to if we need to, where we can lay low and rest. Somewhere remote.”
He nodded. “That sounds sensible. Like where?”
“I was kind of thinking Australia?” It was my home continent back in my original life—it might be nice to see what it was like in the MCU. Part of me wondered if there was a version of me here, but I definitely wasn’t going to go looking. That wasn’t a can of worms I was interested in opening.
Pietro blinked in surprised. “Huh. Well, no one would ever look for us in Australia, at least.”
“There’s actually a couple of the Eternals in the middle of the outback. One of them has some sort of degenerative mental condition. I might be able to use the Mind Stone to help her—they’d be powerful allies.”
Pietro was looking at me dubiously. “‘Eternals’?” he asked, using finger quotes.
“Uh, alien robot people with superpowers.”
He made a face. “Oh, yeah, of course. That makes total sense.”
“Magic and sorcerers are fine, but you draw the line at alien robots?”
“No, I know alien robots are real,” he grumbled. “I just… you’re right. The world is crazy. Okay, so Australia. Any other possibilities?”
“Well, there’s Ta Lo. It’s in China, sort of. Pocket dimension of magic martial artists. Very difficult to find.”
“We don’t exactly have a good track record with magic martial artists.”
I nodded, grimacing slightly. “True enough. Wakanda would be ideal, if we can get their cooperation.”
“You keep coming back to Wakanda. What’s so special about Wakanda?”
“Okay. So… you promise to believe me?”
Pietro eyed me suspiciously. “At this stage I feel like I have very little choice.”
“Secretly, they’re an incredibly technologically advanced society. They cut themselves off from the rest of the world way back when, never suffered when Africa was being colonised, and are now leagues ahead of everyone else in the world.” I grinned at Pietro’s surprised expression. “Also, they have massive amounts of vibranium—the stuff that Captain America’s shield is made out of. Most of their technology is based on it.”
“Right.” He paused for a moment. “…are there any other ridiculously advanced or magical people I should know about?”
I suppressed a laugh and raised a hand, counting off on my fingers. “Well, there’s the Hand, K’un-Lun, Talokan, Pym Technologies, the Clandestines, the Ten Rings, the Red Room, the Skrulls, Attilan—though I’m not sure yet if that one actually exists—and that’s off the top of my head without getting into what I know about what’s out in space… other planets and pantheons of gods, among other things.”
Pietro was quiet for a moment, then shook his head. “What you’ve been given… it’s a lot bigger than I thought it was. What we’re doing, where you’re taking us—this isn’t just about killing Tony Stark or the Avengers anymore, is it?”
“No,” I said, looking at him seriously. “I’ve seen what’s coming, and it’s bigger than the Avengers. Everyone is in danger, from multiple directions. The entire planet. Everyone could die.”
“That’s what you told the Ancient One,” he said slowly. “You said you wanted to make things better. That there were people who didn’t need to die. You meant that.”
I nodded. “I did. I’ve been trying to look at the bigger picture.”
“I don’t see the bigger picture.” A frown twisted his features as he spoke, his hands unconsciously balling into fists. “I have a little picture.”
“I know,” I said, my voice catching in my throat. We still looked at it together, most days. A ragged, worn family photo—Wanda and Pietro, ten years old, with their parents. It was all he had left of them. We’d sit there and he’d try to connect with his amnesiac sibling, to remind me of all I’d ‘forgotten’, and I’d feel like shit as I tried my best to be the sister he didn’t know that he’d lost. I didn’t even know their parents’ names.
Sighing, he collapsed backwards on his bed. I looked from my notebook to him and back again a few times—internally arguing with myself over what I should say—before just following his example and lying back, pressing the notebook to my chest as I stared at the ceiling. We stayed like that, quiet, but not awkward, for a few minutes.
“Oh. I almost forgot. I got you something,” Pietro said abruptly, sitting up and fumbling in his pockets for a moment before offering something to me, hidden in his clenched fist. “Here.”
I swallowed a lump in my throat as I sat back up, then hesitated before reaching out. “Pietro,” I said, a stern note creeping into my voice. “If that is a bug, I am going to be annoyed.”
“It’s not a bug.”
“If it is anything gross,” I amended. “I will be annoyed.”
He shrugged. “If you don’t want it, I’ll take it back.”
“No, okay, fine.” I tentatively held out my hand below his.
He opened his fist, depositing a large oval locket on a thick silver chain into my palm. “It was hard to find one I thought might fit. This one should be good.”
I stared at it for a second before I realised what he meant. It was huge, for a locket, with elaborate embossing front and back and, importantly, it was rounded instead of flat. Flicking it open, I gestured with a hand, twitching my fingers as a swirl of chaos magic appeared around them. The Mind Stone flew over from where it had been hovering near my shoulder and dropped snugly into the open space. I clicked it closed, then shook it a couple of times to make sure it wasn’t just going to pop open.
Pietro reached out a hand expectantly. I nodded, handing the locket and chain to him, then reached back and gathered my hair up out of the way. He was behind me almost instantly, carefully looping the chain around my neck and securing it at the back.
Letting down my hair, I looked up at him, a mixture of emotions warring on my face. “This was really thoughtful. Thank you.”
I fingered the locket absently. Despite what had happened at Kamar-taj, not everything had been a total disaster. This, at the very least, was a solid victory. Ultron was permanently averted, saving countless lives in the process, and I had an Infinity Stone. We had a sling ring, and plenty of options. Things were finally starting to look up.
We both almost jumped out of our skin at a sudden pounding on the door to the room. A loud, familiar voice rang out a second later. “Pietro and Wanda Maximoff, this is Steve Rogers. I’d like to talk.”