I stared listlessly ahead, not really paying attention to much of anything. After a moment, Pietro came and sat down on the edge of the curb next to me, nudging me lightly with his elbow. I half-heartedly nudged him back, but otherwise didn’t respond. My feet were flat on the asphalt, forearms resting on my knees. It was an extremely unladylike way to sit—anyone walking past would definitely be able to see up my dress, but the street was still basically deserted and I was wearing bike shorts underneath, so I didn’t really care.
Yelena was nearby, leaning against our ride—she’d taken out her phone and was frowning at the screen while we waited for Natasha to rejoin us. Nat had taken charge once we were all safely back on solid, definitely-real ground, making sure everyone was still okay before taking a couple of minutes to escort Mrs Davis safely back to her home.
My insides twisted as I thought about the older woman. She’d seemed fine, laughing and smiling about what had happened. She’d patted me on the arm and told me not to worry about it. Even invited us in for tea. As if she’d just been on a strange but otherwise-harmless little adventure rather than having been forcibly snatched from her home by my magic, again, and used as a prop in yet another Wanda Maximoff special.
I looked up from the asphalt as Natasha came back. She shot me an encouraging smile, which I tried to return, but from her expression I knew I hadn’t really pulled it off convincingly.
As she drew closer, Yelena moved from her spot leaning against the car and caught her attention. “We were only in there for like half an hour, at most,” she said, sounding confused. “It’s not even noon.”
“Huh,” Nat said with a frown, looking up to presumably note the position of the sun. “That’s weird.”
“…Is it?” I asked. “That sounds about right to me.”
All three of them gave me an odd look. “What?” Pietro asked, nudging my shoulder again. “No, it isn’t. We were in there for hours.”
I blinked. “Hours?”
“We hiked through two different forests, there was the fight with fake Tony, the joust, that issue we had to deal with with the giants and dwarves… We went through like two dozen different musical numbers.”
“Giants? The joust?” I repeated, sounding a little incredulous.
I knew that time seemed to move differently when I was in someone’s mindscape—going mind-to-mind meant things happened at the speed of thought, which made it all feel a bit wonky—but I still had no real idea what had been going on with the not-Hex I’d created here. It having some sort of subjective time-dilation rolled into it just added another question to the heaping pile I was probably never going to get a real answer to.
“They weren’t really giants,” muttered Yelena sullenly. “The whole thing was stupid. Everyone was the same size.”
Huh. Well, not-Eliza had said that they were being entertained. I laughed, letting my head drop down between my arms. After a few seconds, I made a noise halfway between a sigh and a harumph of frustration. “Well, that’s just typical, isn’t it?” I said, lifting my head back up so I could look at them again. “Everyone else got to go on a whimsical, musical fantasy journey while I had to confront my personal issues.”
“It wasn’t really fun for us, either,” Yelena said grumpily.
I snorted. I hadn’t even heard the details yet and it already seemed like Yelena had hated every second of it. “It can’t have been that bad. It was created by my subconscious, after all,” I joked. “And I’m just a normal person with regular thoughts in my head.”
Pietro and Nat chuckled, but Yelena shot me an annoyed look. “Oh, yeah, sure. This was all a very good and normal thing to do.”
My smile faded and I looked down again, feeling slightly chastened. Natasha stepped over and held out her hand in a silent offer. I reached up to take it, letting her help me back to my feet. “Like you said, it was your subconscious,” she said, her tone gentle. “You couldn’t control it.”
“Yeah, well… Next time, remind me to tell my subconscious to go fuck itself,” I said with a sigh.
She shrugged. “You know what they say, adversity builds character.”
“I’ve already got a lot of character. Is it possible to have too much character?”
There was a moment of silence as Natasha studied my face, looking for… something. “What did Eliza talk to you about?” she asked after a couple of seconds.
“It wasn’t Eliza, remember? Just me. Talking to myself. Thinking through some things,” I hedged, looking off to one side.
She nodded—she didn’t look particularly satisfied with that as a response, but she wasn’t going to push me on it. “I’m here if you want to talk about it, okay?”
“I know. I just… it’s dumb. It doesn’t matter.”
“It clearly matters to you,” Yelena pointed out. “And the three of us didn’t come out here just because we wanted to sample New Jersey’s finest gas station snacks, дура.”
I sighed again. “I’m just worried that something’s going to happen—I don’t know what, maybe with Tony or something—and I’m going to… I don’t know. End up being the bad guy again.”
“Pietro and I won’t let it come to that,” Nat said gently, glanced at my brother and giving him a small smile. “The Avengers actually have a very strict ‘no turning evil’ policy.”
“Oh yeah?” I asked. “How do you enforce that?” She wasn’t getting it, not really. I wasn’t worried about ‘turning evil’, per se, but the bigger conversation wasn’t something I was really ready to have right now.
Natasha put her hands on her hips and gave me a serious look. “I tell you not to turn evil. In a very firm voice.”
That, at least, provoked an amused smile from me. “I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, then faltered again for a moment. “Can we… not tell anyone about this? What happened here, I mean? Please? It doesn’t… everything’s fine, right? The Avengers don’t need a brief.”
The ghost of a frown flitted across Nat’s features, but she nodded reluctantly. “Okay, if that’s what you want. I don’t think there’s any pressing reason we need to talk to anyone about it.”
There was a loud gurgling sound and everyone looked at Yelena. “What?” she said defensively. “Yeah, I’m hungry. I’m pretty sure that lunch we had in there vanished out of my stomach along with everything else.”
Nat let out a small snort of amusement. “Yeah, I think we’re all ready to find something to eat. Come on, we’ll tell you all about our whimsical musical fantasy journey on the way.” She unlocked the car with the remote and everyone slowly started to pile in. As I opened the passenger side door and moved to hop inside, I suddenly felt a prickle on the back of my neck, like I was being watched. I looked around.
There was someone I didn’t recognise standing near the empty lot where my house should have been, just at the edge of the footpath. He was young—a teenager, maybe—with a mop of curly brown hair and dark eyes, dressed in a dark blue zippered hoodie and weathered black jeans. For a moment I thought I saw something glimmer along his hairline, but I blinked and it was gone. He wasn’t doing anything, just… standing there. Watching. I couldn’t place his face, but there was something intensely familiar about him. Another mysterious actor? Or maybe he was just one more of the thousands of people I’d hurt in Westview, one that I didn’t fully remember.
We stared at each other for a moment and I felt a sharp pang of sudden grief—it came out of nowhere, for seemingly no reason, leaving me on the edge of tears. Like I’d lost something important, but didn’t know what. After a couple of seconds, the teen reached up to lift the hood of his jumper over his head, then thrust his hands in his pockets and turned away. I blinked again and he vanished. Just… there one moment, gone the next. If he’d even actually been there to begin with. Maybe it had just been some sort of aftereffect of what had transpired this morning. Whatever was up with the sensation of loss that seeing him had provoked, it disappeared along with him, passing as quickly as it had come and leaving me with only a vaguely hollow, empty feeling in my chest.
“Wanda?” Nat called gently from the driver’s seat. I glanced at her and gave a brief smile, then took one last look around at the street. There was a sense of finality to it. Like I knew it was my last time seeing it; that I would never come back to this place. A shiver ran up my spine. I shook it off, then got in the car.
--
We didn’t hang around Westview very long after that, heading just into the town centre to find a local burger joint to eat at before starting the long drive back to the Avengers compound. After Natasha, Yelena and Pietro finished filling me in on the details of what their experience had been like in the not-Hex, I was somehow even more disappointed on missing out than I already had been. It had basically been exactly what Eliza had promised me if I’d only just played along, with multiple songs from Wicked, Hamilton, The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals—which didn’t even exist yet, though I confirmed with a quick Google that Starkid Productions was going strong in this universe; I was definitely going to try to catch their next production live—and couple of others.
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
I felt especially put out that there had also been a major Galavant-inspired arc and none of them had even heard of the show, despite the fact that the first season had aired this year. I was adamant that we needed to have a watch party, though Yelena expressed an extreme aversion to the idea for some reason. I compromised by exercising a phenomenal amount of self-control and not blasting the soundtrack on Spotify during the drive home.
Instead, hearing about all these songs from shows that I loved made me nostalgic more generally for music I hadn’t heard recently, so I’d started queuing up bands that I hadn’t listened to for a while. In particular, I had started looking up ones that I had mostly listened to in my other life in another world, rather than here, and in doing so I made an extremely important discovery.
There were bands I really liked that had put out songs that I’d never heard before.
The original, Sacred-Timeline-flavour Wanda Maximoff hadn’t really been that interested in metal as a genre, for example, whereas the musical tastes of the person I’d been in another universe had been all over the place, so there was a heap of stuff that completely blindsided me. The song I was listening to finished, then looped back and started playing again for the third time in a row. After a thumping intro, Joakim Brodén’s gruff baritone growled in my headphones again, and I sung along under my breath. “From Brooklyn’s streets a man was forged, a hero born of might…” I had the entire lyrics memorised already.
Sabaton mostly did songs about wars, famous battles, and the people who played a part in them, so it made complete sense that they’d have a song about Captain America; it was called Shield and Star. There was a second song, too, from a different album—Howling Commandos, which was about his whole crew and was also pretty good. I wondered if Steve had heard them. I knew he’d been slowly catching up on stuff over the last few years after he’d been unfrozen, but I wasn’t sure that ‘European metal’ would rank too highly on his list of stuff to listen to and he wasn’t the type to specifically seek out self-aggrandising stuff.
I’d promised everyone a homecooked dinner as an extra thank you for putting up with my bullshit today, mostly because cooking and cleaning made for good distractions and I didn’t really want to be alone with my thoughts. I even briefly hopped a portal back over to Sokovia to pick up some groceries—I wasn’t sure where the best place to grab good-quality paprika and stuff was here in New York, so rather than wasting time looking I’d just gone direct to the source. Paprikash was a pretty simple dish when it came down to it, without many ingredients, so it was important to use the right stuff.
Or maybe it was just the memories. I knew exactly where to get what I wanted and then, when it came to cook, I knew exactly how to put it all together perfectly, as if I’d been doing it my entire life. There was a moment, partway through the preparation steps, where I had to stop for a moment because I’d suddenly had an incredibly vivid recollection—a memory—of being a small girl, laughing with mama as I helped her make dumplings.
I used a spoon to check the sauce, bobbing my head in time to the music as I worked. It had started to thicken, so I poked at the chicken to make sure it was all fully submerged then covered the pot, cracking the lid a tiny bit. I turned the heat down to let the meat braise while I cleaned up the things I’d dirtied during the prep. Pietro popped over to me, waving to get my attention. I couldn’t hear him over my music, but from his gestures I could tell he was saying that I didn’t need to clean up and that he could take care of it. I shook my head and shooed him away. Normally I’d be more than happy to let him do all the cleaning up, but the busywork was helping to keep me distracted.
An hour later, we were sitting down to eat. Natasha’s tiny dining table only had two chairs at it, so we clustered around the coffee table in the lounge instead. Nat and I sat on the couch while Pietro relocated one of the dining chairs and looked askance at Yelena. She gave him a small, grateful smile, but shook her head and plonked herself down on the floor instead.
“Mmphm. This is really good,” Yelena murmured contentedly between mouthfuls.
“Wanda used to make it all the time, before HYDRA,” Pietro said. He’d been grinning like an idiot ever since I’d said I wanted to cook for everyone. It was nice seeing him happy. “It’s mama’s recipe.”
“It tastes even better the next day,” I said absently, poking at a dumpling. “Flavour develops more.”
There had been enough left in the pot for two sets of leftovers to be stowed away in the fridge. I didn’t harbour any illusions about how long they’d survive—knowing Yelena, they’d mysteriously vanish tomorrow.
“Hey, so,” I said, glancing between Yelena and Natasha. “You two were spies and stuff. What’s the best way for me to hide some money?”
Nat frowned briefly. “Hide money?”
“I mean… just in case. Worst case scenario, something bad happens and the US government decides to come after me. I could always just steal whatever I need, I guess, but I’d really prefer not to rob people if I don’t have to. What’s the best way to make sure I’ve still got access to funds? Secret Swiss bank account?”
“You’ve been watching too many movies,” Yelena scoffed, without elaborating.
Natasha nodded. “Swiss numbered accounts aren’t really secret anymore; FATCA took care of that loophole. Too many people evading taxes. There’s a global reporting standard everyone signed onto last year.”
“Cash is easiest, always,” Yelena said firmly. “Find some safe drop spots with secure access. You want a few caches, so you’re not caught out if one gets discovered. Nothing under your name, obviously—nothing with any name attached is better. Fake identities can be compromised.”
Nat gave me a significant look. “If you have someone you think you can trust, someone who might be able to make discrete purchases on your behalf,” she said leadingly. “Leave some funds with them, too. I know a guy.”
“Mm,” Yelena agreed, hurriedly chewing and swallowing so she could add more. “Don’t withdraw a big chunk all at once to hide—you want separate, smaller transactions. If want to be paranoid about it, once you have the cash you should portal all over the world and hit up a whole bunch of different money exchange places for small amounts over the course of a few weeks or months, mix it all together. It’ll be untraceable.”
I nodded slowly. “Cool. I’ll do that.”
There was a lull in the conversation as everyone continued eating. Well, everyone but me—I’d hardly eaten anything yet, mostly just poking at my bowl, and it was still basically full. Paprikash was definitely a comfort food, and cooking had been a good distraction, but I just didn’t really have much of an appetite.
“On a lighter note, I have some notes about some of your casting choices,” Natasha said after a little while, shooting me a cheeky grin. “Chris Evans as Steve worked pretty well, but the guy your subconscious had filling in for Bucky? Who was that?”
“Sebastian Stan,” I said quietly, trying not to sigh.
“Didn’t look anything like him,” Yelena agreed. “If he didn’t have the big gauntlet you’d have no idea.”
“I still don’t get why they were actors at all,” Pietro said. “What was the point of that? Why wouldn’t they just be them?”
“I’m not sure,” Nat replied, looking in my direction. “Wanda?”
“…I don’t know,” I lied.
Yelena straightened up a little, gesturing with her spoon, a small smile on her face. “Oh, and what about sexy Wanda? The dungeon mistress?”
Pietro groaned, deflating slightly. “You know, I’d just managed to block that part out.”
“Olsen was a weird choice,” Yelena pointed out. “I mean, she at least matched with the hair—that sold the look a little—but, I mean, overall she doesn’t really look like you at all.”
“Hey, you okay?” Nat was looking at me; she’d noticed I wasn’t really enjoying the conversation.
“I’m fine. Sorry; can we not talk about this? Change the subject?”
Nat gave me a sympathetic look, glancing down at my mostly-full bowl. She’d definitely noticed that I wasn’t really eating. “What did you want to do this evening?” she asked gently. “We can just curl up on the couch and watch some Netflix or something, if you want?”
I shook my head. “Nah. I don’t… I dunno. I’m not feeling super social tonight,” I said. “You do whatever you want to do. I can drop you at the compound with Pietro, if you like.”
“Are you sure?” she pushed gently. “I know you said you’re fine, but…”
I huffed, exhaling sharply through my nose, and shook my head. I really was getting tired of being treated like I was made of porcelain. “Yeah, I’m sure. Don’t worry about me. I’ll probably just go find some Everclear, try my hardest to get absolutely shit-faced, then probably spend the next six and a half hours sobbing.”
I’d meant it as a joke, but it clearly didn’t land at all.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Pietro asked.
“I’m fine,” I ground out, dropping my spoon into my bowl and shoot him an unimpressed look. “But the next person who asks me if I'm okay will be mentioned, by name, in my suicide note.” I instantly regretted the words as they left my mouth—my last joke had gone down like a lead balloon, but this one punched a hole through the crust of the Earth and kept on going.
Nat and Pietro exchanged a concerned look. Yelena sighed, looking down at her empty bowl, absently twirling her spoon in it for a moment before she seemed to come to some decision. “We could go out dancing?”
I blinked, a little caught off guard by the suggestion. Yelena did like dancing, but she also didn’t think much of the sort of music I liked to dance to. To be fair, that was probably my fault—the one time we’d gone out I’d scarred her with my love of Vengaboys and Aqua, among others.
“I found a…” she hesitated, wincing as though the next words were actively physically painful for her to say. “A really cool place that plays a heap of nineties and early two thousands dance and pop and stuff.”
I’d frozen entirely now, a spike of something indescribable bubbling up inside of me. Yelena? God. Heat rushed to my face. Part of me wanted to hug her while another, stronger part of me was threatening to just break down in tears.
“Maybe we could even…” Yelena continued, looking at Nat mournfully—her sister had realised what she was doing and gave her an encouraging smile. “…do some karaoke, too.”
I took a deep breath and sat up straight, placing my bowl on the coffee table as I stared at her with an unflinching intensity. “Yes. Yes. My soul is immense and needs to be heard. Through a speaker system. By other people. They need to know of my vast, oceanic soul.”
“Whether they want to or not,” Pietro said, a small smile on his face.
--
“Tell me why—I never wanna hear you say… I want it that way!”
“Yo, I’ll tell you what I want; what I really, really want…”
“Stacy, can’t you see? You’re just not the girl for me. I know it might be wrong, but I’m in love with Stacy’s mom!”
“Say it ain’t so, I will not go! Turn the lights off, carry me home—”
“In the midnight hour I can feel your power. Just like a prayer, you know I’ll take you there!”
“You can dance, you can jive; having the time of your life…”
“There lived a certain man in Russia long ago…”
“Rah, rah-ah-ah-ah; roma, roma-ma; Gaga, ooh-la-la…”
“I still hear your voice when you sleep next to me; I still feel your touch in my dreams. Forgive me my weakness, but I don’t know why—without you it’s hard to survive…”
“‘Cause I may be bad, but I’m perfectly good at it, sex in the air—I don’t care—I love the smell of it. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but chains and whips excite me…”
“When I walk in the spot, this is what I see: Everybody stops and is staring at me. I got passion in my pants and I ain’t afraid to show it…”
“Wake me up inside! Wake me up inside! Call my name and save me from the dark…”
“Woah, we’re halfway there! Woah-oh, livin’ on a prayer!”