“No. Well, not in any way that really matters, at least,” Eliza said with a shrug.

“What?”

“Eliza’s dead. You killed her. Well, Wanda-3 killed her. I’m as much Eliza as these are Vision and Natasha. Are you sure you don’t just want to see how this plays out?” she asked, disappointment evident in her tone. “We were about to do a whole ‘duet with your reflection’ thing. Musicals were a great choice, by the way. There’s a heap of our favourites we could run through. Wicked, Galavant, Little Shop of Horrors, Starkid stuff… Hell, we could even just go full Disney. Or something like Les Mis if you really wanted to just be sad about stuff. It’s not too late to pick this back up.”

I stood up, watching her warily, hands by my side, wisps of chaos magic still dripping from my fingers. “I don’t care about whatever psycho thing you’ve cooked up here. Let me go.”

She snorted and shot me a sceptical look. “I’m not keeping you here. You did this to yourself.”

I hesitated for a moment, jaw working silently. “Where are we?” I asked after a few seconds. “Are we still in Westview? Is this a Hex? Or are we inside my mind?”

“You tell me,” she said. “Feel it out.”

I stared at her silently for a moment, then slowly let go of the power I’d called to my hands. I closed my eyes, focusing on my magical senses instead, and reached out cautiously.

The connection I had felt to the door was still there, steadily draining energy from me. With everything that was happening, I hadn’t even noticed until I looked for it. It wasn’t really leading anywhere in particular, though—instead it was just being channelled out into the environment around me.

I still wasn’t sure what this was. It seemed like it was a created space, almost like a mental landscape, but it wasn’t the same—I wouldn’t have to maintain something like that with magic. Plus, despite the vaguely dreamlike nature of it, it also had a solidity to it that didn’t match what I’d expect from a mindscape. It was weird. This felt like a physical space, somehow. Was it some sort of… semi-real pocket dimension built from my mind? Was that even something that could happen? Either way, wherever we were, I was pretty sure I hadn’t overwritten Westview this time. That, combined with the fact that I could feel the connection, instantly made me relax a little bit. If I could feel it, I could break it. End whatever this was whenever I wanted to.

“Ah, maybe hold off for a bit?” Eliza said, as though she had read my thoughts. “You don’t know exactly what will happen if you cut the power while you’re still inside. We might as well talk, first. See if you can learn anything.”

“If this is all made from my mind…” I said slowly. “Okay, fine. That would mean you’re some part of me, right? But then why are they here?”

“I don’t have any special insight here, sorry. Echoes? Shades created from your memories? Whatever you’re doing here, it’s not the same as when you’ve gone into other peoples’ minds.” As she spoke, she walked slowly over to where Vision stood frozen. She looked into his eyes, reaching up with one hand to lightly trace the side of his face with her fingertips. “If we’re going to do this, I might just…”

She put the palm of her hand over the Stone in his forehead and channelled chaos magic into it. His body faded very slightly, turning mildly translucent, traceries of golden energy visible inside of him. Eliza lowered her hand and he went with it, passing intangibly through the stone floor. She gave the top of his head a gentle push with her magic as he fell and he kept going, vanishing entirely as he dropped down to whatever was below us.

Eliza sighed, a complicated series of emotions playing out across her face before she turned back to face me. “Having him here… it wasn’t…”

I nodded. “Yeah.” She didn’t have to explain.

“Do you think he looks the same just because you didn’t look up what Paul Bettany looks like in this universe?” she asked, sounding wistful. “Or would he have always been our Vision?” Eliza paused, then glanced toward ‘Nat’ and gave me a questioning look.

I shrugged, giving her a half smile. “Asian-American Scarlett Johansson can stay,” I said.

She let out a soft snort of amusement as she took a few steps to the side and sat down on the edge of the bed. “I feel like that’s just a weird, advanced form of masturbation.”

“Bitch, you know what we’re about,” I joked half-heartedly, sitting sat back down on the stool in front of the vanity, directly across from her. This was… a lot. We stared at each other silently for a few moments. After a little while, a thought occurred to me and I straightened. “Natasha and the others. If I just passed out or something, they’ll be worried.”

Eliza chuckled, a glimmer of amusement in her eyes. “They’re actually in here, too. Not here, here, but they got sucked in by whatever this is. You don’t need to worry about them, though. They’re being entertained.”

--

“You handled yourselves pretty well back there,” fake Bucky acknowledged, glancing at Nat as they walked. “You do fight like Natasha. Maybe you’re telling the truth, after all.”

They passed by a tree and suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, something huge was in front of them. The group stopped almost instantly.

“What is that?” Yelena gasped in alarm. Natasha tensed, hands finding the hilts of her daggers again as she eyed the creature.

“Oh! It’s a gator!” Mrs Davis exclaimed. “A really big one, too! Mr Davis and I saw a big one like this last year when we were visiting his sister in Florida…” She trailed off, blinking as she peered at the beast more closely. “Maybe not quite as big as this one,” she amended.

It was definitely not an alligator, though it had a similar body structure. The massive beast was sunning itself atop a flat-topped boulder—its rubbery, dark blue-grey skin was streaked with ruddier light greys and it had large, diamond-shaped flippers instead of feet. It had no lips, the skin around its mouth drawn back to reveal rows of irregular, vicious-looking teeth, yellowed and each one as big as her hand.

Bucky glanced at the three of them, seeming a little surprised at their reaction. “It’s a liopleurodon,” he said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“A magical liopleurodon,” Steve said in agreement, gesturing toward the beast with one hand. He seemed utterly at ease and took a step closer, tilting his head as he looked at it expectantly. “It’s going to guide our way to the castle.”

The prehistoric creature shifted its head, its eyes focusing on him, before opening its massive jaws. It looked perfectly capable of biting a person in half with very little effort. The beast made a rumbling, snarling sound in the back of its throat, deep enough that Nat felt it in her chest. None of their actor travelling companions seemed bothered, but Nat took a small, cautious step backward. With its flippers, it didn’t look like the liopleurodon was overly capable of lunging forward to try to eat them, but appearances could be deceptive.

“Oh my,” Mrs Davis said quietly.

“It has spoken,” Steve declared, turning to the rest of them and nodding as though it was the most normal thing in the world.

“It has told us the way,” Sam said, nodding back. The three men started walking again, following the curve of the clearing past the rock the liopleurodon was sunning itself on.

The rest of them hesitated for a moment, exchanging glances. “Okay…” Yelena said uncertainly. “So what part of Wanda’s subconscious does that represent?”

“I… let’s just go.”

--

“I really don’t like the way you said that,” I said.

Eliza shook her head and gestured around at the room. “What do you think is happening? It’s just castles and musical numbers and stuff. It’s fine. They’re not in any danger.”

We were in a castle? Well, that at least explained the stone walls and floor and lack of electrical fittings. I stood back up and paused, looking at the still-frozen Asian-American Scarlett Johansson for a moment before walking past her, heading over toward the tall windows near where I’d been curled up on the floor a handful of minutes ago. The curtains were a deep scarlet, matching the whole room’s distinctly red and mahogany ‘Scarlet Witch’ colour scheme. I brushed one aside with my hand and peered outside.

It was a castle all right. Outside, I could see a crenelated curtain wall, guards in fully-enclosed plate patrolling the battlements. Full plate for normal patrols seemed a little impractical, but given that it wasn’t real I guess I could let that pass. The bailey enclosed by the wall was huge, actually. It was a little Game of Thrones-y, rather than a realistic size for a medieval castle. Just from my window I could see a few ancillary buildings with random servants hurrying back and forth along gardened paths—no one I recognised. What I thought was a large training yard dominated one side, but it was currently empty. I squinted. Hang on. The shape of the buildings and the way they were laid out… was this a weird medieval version of the Avengers compound? Huh. A little part of me wanted to go out and take a look around.

Instead, I turned and looked back over at Eliza. “You know where they are? How do you know what they’re doing?”

She shrugged. “Because this is your mind and I’m you. I know because you know. You really shouldn’t think of me as being separate to you.”

That made a certain kind of sense, but I didn’t really like it. Maybe this was just what it was like, meeting mental constructs that were aspects of yourself. Bucky wouldn’t have liked the facet of himself that had been stalking The Facility as the Winter Soldier, after all, but that didn’t make it less ‘him’. Flexing my magic, I tested the line of energy that was powering this place, reassuring myself that it would be easy to break the connection any time I wanted.

I walked back over to the vanity table and brushed my fingers along its surface. “Mahogany,” I said, enunciating the word in a specific, distinctive way.

“And not just any mahogany…” Eliza said, assuming the same inflection, a small smile tweaking the corners of her mouth. “It’s a very fine material. Very expensive.”

Okay. Yeah. She was me, somehow. I was talking to myself. “I almost made a Hex,” I said slowly. “A proper one, like in Westview the first time around.”

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She shrugged, screwing up her face like she’d caught a whiff of something awful. “Eh, maybe,” she hedged.

“You don’t think it would have worked?”

“I think that, while coming to Westview sucked, it still wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it was the first time. That was the lowest you’ve ever been. ‘The Scarlet Witch is forged, not born’,” she quoted, gestured vaguely with one hand. “You’ve been through a lot. You’re already a lot stronger than you were at this point in the original timeline. But no, I don’t think you’ve been pushed to that level just yet.”

‘The first time’. She said it plainly, matter-of-factly. As if the Wanda that had created the Westview Hex and I were one and the same. It felt right when she said it, even though it made no sense. There were too many things—the way I remembered Pietro dying, things like knowing where exactly the empty lot on Sherwood Drive had been, the way I felt when I thought about Vision and my children, the guilt I’d felt when I’d seen Mrs Davis… all of it. I still had no idea how that could be possible, but it would be stupid to deny it at this point. At least some part of her was in me, too.

My jaw worked silently for a moment. “I thought that maybe confronting what happened in Westview…”

Eliza laughed, shooting me a disbelieving look. “You sure you want to confront what happened in Westview? You really want to examine that? Because to do that properly you’d need to accept that it was based on something that was never even true to begin with.”

“What?” I frowned, taken slightly aback.

“Your happily-ever-after domestic life with Vision. It was a lie. Just an idealised fiction based on your own poorly-formed ideas of what real relationships were like. Why do you think your touchstone for the Hex was your comfy family sitcoms? You never really had a proper relationship with Vision.”

I felt my face flush a little bit. “We loved each other.”

“Sure you did, but that’s not enough. Ninety per cent of all relationships fail. What you had wasn’t special in any way, no matter how much you wanted it to have been. It ended before it had a chance to be.”

“Our chance was taken from us.” My tone was sharp, a cold mix of anger and sadness.

“You would have ruined it anyway, in the end, just like you ruin everything. Vision was naïve—he might have had the mental maturity of an adult, but he had basically no life experience. He was a toddler grappling with his first set of real feelings for another person. You were more than happy to take advantage of that. You’d lost Pietro, lost the crusade against Stark that had defined most of your life… you had nothing, so you desperately clung on to the first thing you found that you could drag down with you.”

“Fuck you,” I spat, my eyes glowing with power. My hands had clenched into fists, trembling slightly at my sides. “That’s not true.”

“Clearly part of you worries it might be.”

There was an unpleasant tightness in my chest again. I took a breath, trying to steady my emotions instead of lashing out. “…It doesn’t matter anyway. Vision’s gone. He’s not coming back. I have other people who care about me.” I looked over toward where Asian-American Scarlett Johansson was still standing, oblivious to her surroundings. After a moment’s consideration, I flicked my hand, sending a thread of magic over to her.

She snapped back into motion, blinking, then looked between Eliza and I, her expression a mixture of confusion and caution. “Wanda?”

The corners of my mouth tugged upwards. It wasn’t really her, but… “I love you,” I told her, the weight of the words a comforting touchpoint. I really, really did.

She returned the small smile, though concern was still evident in her eyes. “I love you, too. What’s going on?”

Eliza snorted derisively. “Oh, yeah, great, the self-hating professional manipulator loves you. That’s a massive step up. Nat said it herself—she’s never even been in a genuine romantic relationship before. All of her past experience is built on lies and exploiting people. That little voice in the back of your head? The one that pops up occasionally, wondering if you’re being ‘managed’? That’s always going to be there, because you’re never going to be sure. Not entirely.”

Asian-American Scarlett Johansson flinched back at her words, looking hurt. “That’s not fair,” she said. “I’m trying. Okay, yeah, I’m not good at expressing my feelings, but that doesn’t mean they’re not real.” She looked from Eliza to me. “You know me, Wanda. Better than literally anyone else on the planet. Better than I know myself, sometimes.”

“Which means that you know it was almost blind chance that she latched onto you, emotionally, this time around, instead of Bruce,” Eliza countered. “Her feelings are real, sure, but is it love? Or just her inexperienced fumbling with her own emotions, desperately clinging to something the same way you clung to Vision?”

“Don’t listen to her,” Asian-American Scarlett Johansson said, shaking her head. “It’s normal to have fears and doubts—people are complicated and we’ve both got a lot of baggage. But what we have is real. Don’t ever doubt that. She’s trying to sabotage us.” Fake Nat’s body language shifted dangerously as she turned toward Eliza.

Eliza flicked a hand lazily toward her and both their eyes glowed. Nat froze again, then straightened up and marched out of the room, closing the door firmly behind her.

I stood up a little straighter, undeterred. “It’s not just her, either. I have Pietro. Yelena. Steve. Bucky. Everyone. I’m not alone.”

Eliza didn’t seem put off by my assertion, either. She just shook her head and let out a bitter-sounding laugh. “Oh yeah? And how long do you think that’ll last? You ‘weren’t alone’ last time, either, but that didn’t stop Westview from happening. Where was everyone then?”

“It wasn’t like that and you know it. Steve was gone. Tony died. So did Nat.”

“And now you’re making excuses for them, just like you always do,” she scoffed, folding her arms. “Okay, shall we do this? You want to talk about what happened last time? Fine. How did Vision’s body end up with SWORD?”

I blinked. “…What?”

“You heard me. Thanos murdered him right in front of you. Right in front of everyone. He snapped his fingers and half the universe vanished, but you know who was still there? Steve. Natasha. Bruce and Thor. Two-thirds of the Avengers. So, tell me, how did Vision’s body go from lying in the dirt in Wakanda to being dissected on a table in a SWORD laboratory?” Eliza stood up as she spoke, starting to pace back and forth in front of me.

My mouth had gone dry. It was something I’d tried not to think too deeply about. When I found out where Vision’s body was being kept—when I’d gone to confront SWORD and get him back—I’d wondered how he’d ended up there in the first place. I never found out. I didn’t ask. Didn’t want to know the answer.

“Vision… he wasn’t the only one gone. Everyone lost people.”

“Vision was the only actual corpse they had to show for it, though, wasn’t he? You’d think maybe that would have meant something, but how did they treat him? Steve was so stubborn at the time. ‘We don’t trade lives’. But when it came down to it, Vision’s body wasn’t even cold before he abandoned him. He didn’t care about him. Not really. He cared about the principle of the thing,” she spat, pacing the length of the bed like a caged tiger. “Five years. Five years before you came back and no one thought to bury him. Instead, they just handed him over.”

“That’s… that’s not…”

“And Westview? The Westview Hex lasted for almost two weeks. SWORD had plenty of time to come in and set up shop. Steve and Tony and Nat were gone—okay, fine. But where was Sam? Where was Clint? Where were Bucky and Bruce?”

My cheeks were hot, tears springing up in the corners of my eyes again. “They didn’t know,” I said, but there wasn’t any conviction behind it.

“Oh, sure, yeah. You really think Darcy didn’t let someone know you were there? No one reached out? Or were they just happy to let SWORD handle it, because they didn’t care enough to check in themselves? Or, okay, what about after the fact? Because they definitely heard about it afterwards… But no one came to check on you, did they? You didn’t see anyone for an entire year afterward, while you were studying the Darkhold.”

“I was… they didn’t know where I was.”

“That’s bullshit. If they’d bothered to look, they’d have found you and you know it. Strange did, the second he wanted something from you. But no one cared enough to go looking before that.” Her voice broke. Tears were streaming down her face, matching the ones on mine. “When you needed them all the most—when you had nothing—where were they? Nowhere. They were nowhere. You fucking needed them and no one came. They left you alone to die. You had lost everything and they left you alone.”

“That isn’t—” I stopped, my words cut off by a small sob. I wasn’t even sure what I was trying to say.

“Before that, you had next to nothing and you still threw it all away to help Steve, to violate the Accords and go on the run. Bucky, Sam, Clint… they were there. You were supposed to be one of them. When it was your turn, they should’ve been there for you in return, shouldn’t they? After everything you did for them—everything you lost, everything you sacrificed—what was it for? What was the point? And you still call these people your friends? Even after you’ve seen the way they’ll just abandon you?”

I couldn’t respond. The words refused to coalesce into a coherent argument.

“You know what the truth is: They’re afraid of you. All of them. They always have been. They never stopped being afraid of you—not in this or any other universe. I mean, do you really think that Tony isn’t coming up with countermeasures to contain you, if he decides it becomes necessary? Do you think he’s spoken to Kamar-taj about you yet? The Ancient One agreed to leave you alone for now, but unless something big changes your truce isn’t going to last forever. What happens after Kaecilius is dealt with?” Eliza exhaled sharply in frustration, shaking her head. “At least Shuri’s open about how much she hates you. Means she’s less likely to lie directly to your face like everyone else does.”

Was that something I needed to worry about? Tony and the Ancient One deciding that I needed to be contained or banished? God, I hated that I couldn’t trust him.

Eliza had run out of steam a little bit, her pacing slowing until she was simply standing in front of me, her shoulders slumped. “Do you think that's why Eliza self-destructed so spectacularly?” she asked quietly. “Styled herself as the villain because she knew, no matter what, that that was how things were always going to end up anyway? Because she knew it was only a matter of time before they all turned on you?” She smiled bitterly. “At least her way, she got to say it was her fault. That there was at least a reason. Bad things happened because they were active choices she was making, not because the people she liked and cared about just abandoned her. Maybe it made her feel like she had some control over it.”

“I can’t control their fear. Only my own,” I quoted quietly—words I’d used in another lifetime to justify my actions then, too. “…Why should I listen to you?” My voice was husky. Raw. I licked my lips and took a deep, shaky breath, staring at the ground. I couldn’t look at her. “I mean, clearly some part of me hates myself, and I can’t think of a better avatar for that part of me than the copy that literally tried to kill me. You’re trying to sabotage me.”

“Eliza never hated you, Wanda,” she said. She sounded… tired. Sad. “Was she angry at you? Sure, of course. But she never hated you. Not really. There were a half-dozen times when she could have killed you. If she’d really hated you, she never would have hesitated, over and over again, the way that she did.”

My shoulders slumped. “So what part of me are you, then?” I asked bitterly. “Why are you saying all of this? What do you expect me to do? What do you want?”

“I don’t know. I’m just so tired of being hurt over and over and over again. I think…” she hesitated, then reached over and touched my arm. I flinched away slightly but she stepped forward, into my personal space. I looked up from the floor and froze as she looked into my eyes, seemingly searching for something. “I think I want it to be okay for you to be angry sometimes. To be selfish. I’m the part of you that knows that what you’ve been through—the way you’ve been treated—isn’t right or fair or acceptable. It’s never been right. You deserve to be treated well. With respect. I’m not the part of you that hates you, Wanda. I’m the part of you that loves you.”

We stood there quietly for a moment, just looking at each other, then she hesitantly raised her arms, holding them out in a silent offer. I accepted, stepping into the hug. It was… nice. Comforting. She squeezed, holding me tightly as the tears came again.

I wasn’t sure how long we stood there, but after a while I sniffed, wiping under my eyes with a thumb. “…Is this some sort of bizarre self-care?” I asked, feeling a small, genuine smile touch my face.

I gently pulled back from the embrace and paused, frozen for a moment. We were standing very close. Our faces were inches away from each other, our cheeks still hot and flushed from when we’d both been crying. My hands had fallen lower as I’d pulled out of the hug, but had stopped halfway, lingering lightly on her hips, only a thin layer of red silk separating us.

Eliza raised an eyebrow, the corner of her mouth tugging upward slightly. “Okay, now that really would be a weird, advanced form of masturbation.” She tilted her head in a small shrug. “But I mean… we could. For science.”

I laughed—a bright, full-bodied outburst that ended in a coughing fit. “Oh my god,” I said, wheezing a little bit and leaning on Eliza’s shoulder for support. “Can you imagine if anyone found out?”

“Tony would never let us live it down,” Eliza said, then cleared her throat and put on a ‘Tony’ voice. “Wanda, when I told you to go fuck yourself, I didn’t mean that literally.”

We both laughed again. Neither of us had stepped away from the other, our hands still lingering a little. Was this going to happen? I wasn’t sure. Hadn’t decided yet. It really would be a little weird, but that hadn’t ever stopped me before. There was a charged moment of silence as we looked at each other.

Eliza let out a soft sigh. “Patterns and rhyming timelines… do you really think we’re ever going to be allowed to be happy?”

“Our magic seems to think so,” I said with a shrug. “Ten of Cups, remember?”

At the mention of the Tarot reading, Eliza’s face fell a little and she took a step back, breaking physical contact. “About that…” She hesitated, dipping her eyes to the floor uncomfortably for a moment before looking back up at me. “We’ve been avoiding thinking about some of the implications, but I think there’s something important we really need to acknowledge as a serious possibility. You’re… not going to like it.”