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ginnsbaker · 7 months

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Bulletproof (10/10)

Part Summary: After figuring out your feelings for each other, you and Wanda return to the Avengers compound to determine your future.

Chapter word count: 4.1k+ | Tags: Smut (18+ only), Fluff, Steve being Steve, A little reunion with everyone else | Ship: Wanda Maximoff x Gender Neutral Reader

Author's Note: Another series comes to an end! But wait there're more--the alternative ending which will be posted tomorrow (or the day after tomorrow at the latest!). I had so much fun writing "Bulletproof" and it wouldn't be possible without the anon who initially requested a oneshot. Thank you to all who commented, reblogged, liked and read this mini series. Many of you are unaware that this blog was primarily a fanart blog before I started posting fics here, and I've been thinking about whipping up a short comic strip of a scene from Bulletproof, so watch out for that :)

Series Masterlist

As the morning sunlight filters through the window, Wanda stirs from her slumber. Blinking open her eyes, she's greeted with the sight of you, peacefully sleeping next to her. She can't help but remember the previous time she woke up with you beside her. That morning realization, that she had fallen for you, had sent her into a panic, eventually causing her to slip away to her room before you could wake up.

But this time is different. There's no urge to run, no lingering fear. Instead, there's an overwhelming sense of contentment and a desire to push closer to you. Wanda reaches out, letting her fingertips trace the curve of your nose, moving down to trace your slightly parted lips. A soft smile graces her face, watching as your brows furrow in mild annoyance at being disturbed.

She doesn’t think she’s ever felt this way for anyone. With that conclusion, rather than pulling away, Wanda leans in, her lips brushing against your forehead in a soft, chaste kiss.

When your eyes flutter open, they're met with Wanda's gentle gaze, filled with warmth and adoration. “Good morning,” she giggles happily.

Your lips stretch into a sleepy grin before your eyes travel down her naked form. “Mmm, it certainly is,” you mumble, pulling her closer, nestling her against your chest.

Wanda's eyes glitter with a mischievous spark as her fingers gradually drift down from your waist. The slow, deliberate journey of her fingertips over your abdomen has your heart rate quickening, and her touch alone makes your skin prickle with anticipation. By the time her hand settles between your thighs, cupping you softly, the drowsiness that once weighed down your eyelids is entirely forgotten.

A gasp leaves your lips, your body instinctively pressing into her touch. The sensation of her fingers teasing over the sensitive skin makes warmth pool in your belly, the heat of your arousal becoming impossible to ignore.

Wanda's tongue traces the contours of your ear before playfully nipping at your earlobe. Her breath is warm as she whispers, “Did I wake you?” Her tone is dripping with innocence, but the mischievous glint in her eyes tells a different story.

You swallow hard, finding it difficult to form words with her hand expertly coaxing out your desire. “You... have a unique way of saying 'good morning',” you manage to reply, a lump forming in your throat as her hand continues to move deliberately between your legs.

Wanda's smirk is devilish, full of promise. “I thought you'd appreciate it.”

“I do,” you reply, voice husky, as you shift to sit up against the headboard. Wanda takes the cue, momentarily halting her touch, only to move herself gracefully and straddle your lap. As she does, the sheets cascade from her waist, revealing the tantalizing wetness that's gathered at the juncture of her thighs. Your gaze locks onto the dampened patch of hair above her core, and you can't suppress a smirk, realizing she's been aroused for some time—perhaps the entire duration you’ve been asleep.

Locked in an intense gaze with Wanda, your fingers precariously trace her inner thighs, until they finally meet their intended mark, lightly brushing over her slick entrance. The mutual sensation prompts an audible sigh from both of you: Wanda, overwhelmed by the electrifying touch, and you, awed by the fervent response of her body as she dampens your fingers even further.

She’s so wet and so eager for you. You can’t believe how lucky you are to have her this way.

“Shit, baby, you’re gonna be the death of me…” you trail off before claiming her lips into a heated kiss, while Wanda keens against your mouth at the term of endearment.

With each light, teasing touch, Wanda's breath catches, soft whimpers escaping her as your deliberate pace keeps her on the precipice of desire. For a moment, she seems content with the languid rhythm you've set, a mix of frustration and pleasure playing on her face. But as the minutes tick by, that patience wanes. Her hips begin to grind against your hand, trying to draw you deeper, to elicit more than just a graze. Each time she attempts to capture your fingers within her, you deftly pull away, drawing out the dance and stoking the fire of her desperation.

The room fills with her ragged breathing and soft pleas, a sob catching in her throat as her need grows more pronounced. Recognizing the edge she's on, you decide it's time to give in—but not entirely on her terms.

Guiding her, you position her over your waiting fingers, the slickness making for easy entry. Whispering sultrily into her ear, you urge, “Ride me.”

The command ignites something in her, and Wanda starts moving, her rhythm gaining momentum as she rides your fingers, the sound of wetness and her moans filling the room. You take the opportunity to explore the canvas of her skin with your mouth. You suck, nip, and kiss, marking her pale, porcelain skin with more bruises to add to the collection from last night.

The fervor in Wanda's eyes intensifies, her movements becoming more frantic. You can tell she's on the edge, so close to her climax, and that's when you decide to change the game.

“Stop,” you whisper, and Wanda freezes, her eyes wide and pupils dilated. You carefully slide your fingers out of her, and she whines from the sudden emptiness, her eyes pleading. With a smirk, you bring your wet fingers to your lips, savoring the taste of her.

Wanda's breathing is ragged, her chest heaving as she looks at you, equal parts frustration and desire evident in her gaze. “Why?” she breathes, her voice almost a whimper.

“You'll see,”you reply cryptically, instructing her to lie on her back. Wanda obeys, and then you position yourself over her, placing a leg between hers. Your eyes lock onto each other as you lower yourself, allowing your centers to meet, the sensation immediately sending jolts of pleasure through both of you.

Surprised by the overwhelming feeling of feeling her against you, you wait for the tightening in your stomach to subside before you start to move, grinding your hips against hers. The friction between your sexes is intoxicating, driving both of you wild. Your hands find purchase on Wanda's hips, guiding her to meet your thrusts. Her hands wander up to grip the sheets, her knuckles white as she tries to anchor herself.

Your rhythm builds, each thrust deep and unyielding, fucking Wanda further into the mattress. The intensity of your movement eventually pushes her to find purchase in you, and as you feel Wanda's nails dig into your back, you can't help the low growl that escapes your throat. The blend of pain and intense pleasure from her touch makes your head spin.

“I'm sorry,” she breathes out when she feels the wetness of blood under her fingers.

But you shake your head, urging her on. “It's okay,” you assure her, a wicked grin on your face. “Feels good. Do it again.”

Her fingers once more find their way to your back, and each time she scratches, the sensation of your skin repairing itself serves to heighten the pleasure for both of you. It becomes a dance of sorts—Wanda marking you, you healing, both of you lost in the deliriousness of the exchange.

Her moans become more frantic, her mouth falling open as you drive into her again and again and again. “Don't stop. Please, just like that.”

And you're more than happy to oblige.

In a bold move, you shift your weight, seamlessly flipping Wanda beneath you without breaking contact, the newfound angle allowing you to delve even deeper, each thrust meeting her sweet spot, causing her to gasp and cling to you desperately. Her legs wrap around your waist, pulling you closer, urging you to go faster, harder.

You can feel the build-up, the familiar pressure that signals an impending climax. “Wanda,” you gasp, your voice heavy with need.

She responds with a keening whimper, her walls pulsating against you, urging you on. The two of you move in a frenzied manner, chasing that peak together, moving as one. The feeling is so intense, so raw, that when you both finally shatter, the pleasure is all-consuming.

As the aftershocks ripple through you both, you collapse onto the bed beside her, both panting heavily.

After a few moments of silence, you turn to her, the weight of the moment pressing down on you. “Hey,” you begin, swallowing hard, “I know it might seem too soon, but I can't help how I feel.”

“What are you saying?” Wanda asks, looking up at you, chest still heaving and you think she’s redder than she was just a few seconds ago.

“I’m saying I love you,” you answer with a soft smile.

Tears pool in her eyes, catching the morning light in a shimmering dance. She reaches out, cupping your face, and whispers, “I love you too.”

You might not recall much of your past self, but somehow, you wouldn't change this present for anything.

The two of you are nestled on the couch, mugs of steaming coffee in hand. Every so often, your eyes meet Wanda's, a smile forming on both your lips as the remnants of the morning's escapade play on repeat in your minds.

Soon, however, the serene atmosphere is interrupted by heavy footsteps approaching the front door.

“Were you expecting a visitor?” you ask.

Wanda shakes her head, placing her mug on the coffee table. “No…”

The apprehension in her voice is evident, and the two of you exchange worried glances.

“Hide,” she whispers urgently, her eyes darting to the bedroom door.

“Why? I've got my powers back,” you argue, rising to your feet.

Wanda's lips press into a thin line. “You might not remember how to use them,” she whispers urgently. “You could get hurt.”

You smirk, rolling your eyes. “Pretty sure I can take a bullet or two.”

Wanda looks like she's about to argue further when the front door slams open, the force of it sending it crashing into the adjacent wall. Her reflexes are instantaneous: Scarlet tendrils of magic emanate from her fingers, weaving a defensive barrier between the intruder and the two of you.

However, as the dust settles and the silhouette becomes clear, Wanda's magic falters, her eyes widening in recognition.

“Vision?”

Vision, slightly wary or Wanda's immediate defensive response, raises his hands in a peaceful gesture. “Sorry for barging in unannounced,” he says.

Wanda lowers her hands slowly, the red magic dissipating. “What are you doing here?”

“Steve has ordered both of you to return to the compound immediately.”

Wanda narrows her eyes. “Why?”

“He didn't specify, but it seemed urgent,” Vision replies, his tone indicating that he's as much in the dark as Wanda.

“Is it about the organization that's hunting Y/N down?”

Before Vision can answer, the sound of soft footsteps signals another arrival.

“They've been subdued,” Natasha declares without preamble, her eyes locking onto yours, a recognition in them. “The organization was kidnapping ex-agents who chose to live a normal life. And when your powers resurfaced, Y/N, they were hellbent in wielding you into a weapon.”

Wanda's protective instincts flare up. “Nat, I'll only return to the compound with Y/N if you can guarantee they'll be free. They've been through enough.”

Natasha hesitates, shifting her weight on one foot. “I can't promise freedom, Wanda, but I can promise safety. We need to ensure that no one else poses a threat to Y/N, or to any of us.”

Wanda looks torn, her eyes darting between Natasha and you, weighing the options and the promises. After what feels like an eternity, she exhales deeply. “Alright, but the moment Y/N is in any danger, we're out. Understood?”

Natasha nods. “Understood.”

She then takes a moment to glance around the room, an appreciative smile forming on her lips. “I must admit, you two found quite the hideout,” she comments, observing the tasteful yet cozy decor, the soft lighting, and the clothes thrown carelessly on the couch.

With the bedroom door ajar, Natasha's keen gaze settles on the slightly rumpled bed, a few candles still burning around it, and a teasing grin crosses her face. “Although,” she tilts her head, studying the two of you, “It looks more like a love nest than a hideout.”

You can feel the heat rising to your cheeks at her words. Though she doesn't say it outright, the implication is clear, and it's even more embarrassing given how accurate her observation is. You avoid her gaze, feeling slightly guilty as you remember the passionate moments shared with Wanda just the night before and again this morning.

Your face fails to hide anything and Natasha chuckles at you knowingly.

“Aren't there better things to spy on than our personal lives?” Wanda asks, the tips of her ears turning a pink hue.

Natasha laughs lightly, her arms crossed over her chest. “I can’t help it when the evidence is all around,” she teases, while you groan in embarrassment, hiding your face in your hands.

She then pretends to sniff the air, prompting a flustered Wanda to hurriedly nudge her towards the door before she can make any more cheeky remarks.

Steve is not happy.

But he isn't frowning either.

He has that ever-present solemn look on his face, and the only giveaway that something's off is the small patch he missed while shaving his chin earlier. Just as Vision is about to mention it, Natasha silently warns him off with a subtle shake of her head.

Steve leans forward, resting his hands on the table, his knuckles white with tension. “Wanda, seriously? Again? I can't keep covering for you every time you break the rules.” The disappointment in his eyes says more than his words ever could.

Wanda, defiant, steps forward. “If I hadn't been breaking those rules, Y/N would be in some corner of the world right now, being used by those monsters for their wicked games.”

“That doesn't justify your recklessness. We have protocols for a reason.”

Wanda's eyes flash with determination. “And sometimes, those protocols fall short, Steve. Y/N needed protection, and I gave it.”

Steve drags a hand through his hair, attempting to keep his composure, but it's slipping away with each passing second. “It's not just about the safety of one individual, Wanda. It's about the safety of the entire team. If we don't trust each other to follow the rules, then how can we function as a team?”

“Oh, cut the bullshit, Steve,” Natasha says sharply from behind them. “Half of these rules are outdated, and you know it. If Tony came up with these, you wouldn't agree to half of them anyway.”

Steve's eyes narrow at Natasha, a silent question in them.

She doesn't flinch. “Wanda did what she thought was right, and she's not the only one bending rules around here. Some rules are meant to be questioned, especially if they compromise the safety of our own.”

“But I’m not one of you right?” you chime in, surprising everyone, but Wanda most of all. Throughout the ride back to the compound, you'd been uncharacteristically silent, leaving Wanda tempted on more than one occasion to delve into your thoughts, seeking answers.

“Y/N,” Wanda mutters, but you raise a hand, stopping her, your eyes trained on Steve.

“I understand the need for rules, for protocols,” you say, your voice steady. “But this entire conversation assumes that I'm just some defenseless outsider. Wanda did what she did to protect me, yes. But she also did it because she knows what I'm capable of and how my abilities, and the knowledge I possess, could've been misused.”

Taking a step forward, Wanda catches a fleeting glimpse of the person you once were in the way you now stand before Steve. “The truth is, I'm not sure where I belong—here or anywhere else. But I do know this,” you say, pausing to look at Wanda and smiling. “I belong with her.”

Wanda meets your smile, her eyes shining in the wake of your confession. If the choice were hers, the two of you would be anywhere but here—maybe in a distant place where you could learn to find happiness, unburdened by duties and weight of the world.

Natasha, a smirk tugging at the corner of her lips, comments, “Well, this day just got a lot more interesting.”

Steve's shoulders sag, and for a moment, he appears older than his years, the burden of leadership is evident in every line of his face. “Wanda, I understand more than anyone the pull of duty and personal attachment. It's not always about the bigger picture, sometimes it's about the person standing next to you.”

He looks directly at you. “You still don't remember everything, Y/N. And with your powers resurfacing, it complicates matters. You can't just be thrown back into the role of an Avenger. You're essentially starting from scratch. There will be evaluations, both physical and mental. Training. Reacclimation. The compound isn't the ideal place for that.”

He then turns to Wanda, “But Wanda, you belong here with us. You're an Avenger.”

“Perhaps,” Wanda says before standing next to you and interlacing your fingers together. “But I also belong with Y/N. If I have to choose, then—”

“Maybe you don’t have to,” A voice from outside announces. The room's automatic doors slide open, revealing Tony Stark.

Steve regards him with a short nod. “Tony.”

“Interesting conversation we're having here,” he says, glancing at the group. “I think I might have a different approach.”

Everyone looks to him expectantly. But he turns to you and says, “What if we could get your memories back, Y/N?”

Wanda straightens up, her attention immediately drawn to Tony's words. “What do you mean?”

Tony taps a holographic tablet that suddenly appears in his hand. An intricate blueprint springs to life in the air, hovering above it. “While you guys were deep in your heart-to-heart, I've been in touch with T'Challa in Wakanda.”

“Wakanda? What do they have to do with this?” Steve asks.

Tony continues, “They've developed a technology that accesses areas of the brain we've barely touched on. Something that's way ahead of anything we've seen or worked on. If Y/N's memories are locked away somewhere in there,” Tony gestures to your head, “I’m not promising anything, but they might have the key.”

You swallow hard, Tony’s proposition sinking in. The idea of venturing to Wakanda, a place both unfamiliar and undeniably imposing, is overwhelming. But if it brings back your memories…

“I’ll do it,” you tell them.

“I’m coming with you,” Wanda says.

Steve hesitates, rubbing the back of his neck. “Wanda, it's not that simple. It's a highly sensitive mission, and with everything that's happened recently…”

“Steve,” Wanda cuts in, “I'm not asking for permission. I'm telling you.”

He lets out a weary sigh. “Tony? What do you think?”

“Why are you even asking me, Cap? You're the captain here. And if I remember correctly,” he adds with a smirk, “I'm not the one who can assign Wanda a 'mission' to formally accompany Y/N to Wakanda.”

Wanda catches onto Tony's implication immediately. “That's right. This can simply be a mission assignment. Y/N's retrieval of their memories is crucial, and who better to assist and protect them than me?”

“She's correct,” Vision interjects. “The restoration of Y/N's memories is of utmost importance. Wanda is uniquely qualified to help and ensure their safety.”

Natasha chuckles from the back, “Looks like you're cornered, Rogers. Majority rules.”

Steve looks between you and Wanda. After a moment, he nods slowly, a hint of a smile appearing at the corners of his lips. “Alright,” he concedes. “Wanda, you'll accompany Y/N to Wakanda. It's a mission.”

Wanda exhales, relief flooding her features. She turns to you, squeezing your hand, “We'll do this together.”

Tony, satisfied, adds, “And just to be clear, I'm always up for a trip to Wakanda. Count me in.”

From the doorway, a grin appears on Bucky’s face. “Great timing,” he comments, sauntering in. “I’ve been meaning to make a trip back to Wakanda. Now I can hitch a ride with you all.”

Natasha, already with a sly smile, says, “I’ll make the sandwiches. Wakandan cuisine is great, but I know how some of you are with new food.”

Sam, who’s been eavesdropping with Bucky, rolls his eyes from behind her. “Speak for yourself. Last time you tried their spicy dish, I thought we'd need to call in a medic.”

Steve looks around at his team, utterly confused. “Why is everyone suddenly so eager to go to Wakanda? This isn't a field trip.”

Bruce, peeking from behind Sam, adds, “Well, I’ve heard they have some impressive labs. Wouldn’t mind taking a look myself.”

Steve throws his hands up in mock surrender. “I give up. I can't control any of you.”

You laugh, nudging Wanda playfully. “Looks like it’s going to be a full house.”

Rather than reply, Wanda tugs you aside for a more private moment. “You do have a place here, you know? With all of us, as family, not just beside me.”

“It doesn’t feel like I’ve earned it,” you admit.

“You have,” Wanda says softly, leaning in to place a tender kiss on your cheek. “You just haven't realized it yet.”

Before you can react further, the door bursts open again and Daisy storms in, her face lighting up when she sees you. In an instant, she's wrapping her arms around you in a tight embrace. You stiffen slightly, taken aback by the sudden gesture from someone you don’t recall knowing. But not wanting to be rude, you return the embrace lightly.

Wanda clears her throat pointedly, and Daisy's eyes widen in realization. She pulls back, a sheepish grin forming. “Sorry, I got carried away. I just missed you,” she chuckles, but the apologetic glance she shoots Wanda suggests she remembers very well whose territory she's treading on.

“Hey, I’m Daisy,” she says with a grin, extending her hand to you. “We’re friends, you know. Actually, you’re my favorite teammate.”

From the corner of your eyes, you catch Wanda's expression, tight and slightly guarded. You smirk inwardly, amused by her obvious display of possessiveness.

Taking her hand, you give it a friendly squeeze. “I’m sorry, Daisy,” you mutter, letting go. “I don’t remember.”

“Don’t worry about it. On the bright side, at least you won’t remember all the embarrassing moments we’ve had together.”

Puzzled, you ask, “What moments?”

Before Daisy can answer, Steve yells over the growing chatter in the room. “Alright, everyone! Thirty minutes to pack. We're headed to Wakanda.”

Before you can process what’s happening, Wanda’s hand wraps around yours, pulling you towards the door. You're yanked forward, stumbling slightly in her rush. Glancing over your shoulder, you manage a quick, “Sorry, Daisy. See you soon?”

Daisy just chuckles, shooting you and Wanda a knowing, amused smile.

The sun dips low over Wakanda, painting the city and its green expanse in rich gold. The past couple of days blur with laughs, music, and dance as everyone celebrates the homecoming of old friends. But as the last aircraft departs, leaving a trail of smoke behind, the compound becomes eerily silent, except for the two of you.

The suite you're given overlooks the heart of Wakanda. From the balcony, the lulling sound of the waterfalls adds to the allure of the den you and Wanda have created within the room. Time seems to lose meaning. You seize every moment, every opportunity, tasting and immersing in each other fully.

The days merge into nights and back into days. You emerge, mostly together, to grab a quick meal. The only other commitment you hold is to work with Shuri, who is eager and hopeful that her technology can unlock your memories.

On one of those ordinary nights, you lie on your back, gazing at the ceiling. For once, your mind is at peace, void of its usual chatter, because you've never experienced contentment quite like this before. Beside you, Wanda lies, her skin bare and glistening, evidence of your ardor still evident between her thighs.

Wanda traces patterns on your arm, her fingers light and feather-soft. “You know,” she begins, her voice husky from recent activities, “This is the best mission I've ever been on. I don't want it to end.”

Turning to face her, you take in her flushed cheeks and tousled hair. Your hand reaches up to tuck a stray lock behind her ear. “It doesn't have to end, Wanda,” you reply, locking your eyes with hers. “With or without my memories, with or without my abilities, I'll always stay by your side.”

She pulls you closer, seeking comfort in your embrace. “Promise?” she murmurs.

You smile, pressing a soft kiss on her forehead. “Promise.”

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wmarximoff · 2 years

Text

save your tears for another day | w. maximoff

summary: you and Wanda had a troubled relationship to say the least, which from the beginning was doomed to end. but all it takes is one mission that leads to a little girl with her eyes and your nose for your life and hers to change completely.

warnings: angst, mentions of smoking, parental abandonment, trauma.

pairing: Wanda x fem!reader

word count: 17k

A/N: this is, like, huge. it took a long time to write. i don't think i've ever genuinely tried so hard for something kjfskdfhsdk

anyways, enjoy!

|masterlist|

༺ᱬ༻

It's late in the night, one-o'clock or so (maybe more, by no means less than that). It's eerily quiet in the alleys of Lower Manhattan, as if the whole region was in anticipation for this night, its shrewd eyes looking into your loft, into you.

It's that late dawn when you find yourself deep into the night to sit comfortable in a high swivel chair placed on the wide balcony of your loft, so many feet above the sidewalk, the people’s heads and the streetlights, to smoke a sturdy cigarette which in nothing you like to taste (the sensation that slides across the face of your tongue is bitter and rough, like chewing on a sandy stone).

It's a shamefully commonplace bad habit in your actions, adopted here and there, that usually accompanies you in puffs of swirling smoke throughout your lonely reveries taken at moments like this, grounded in darkness and an emptiness that tends to be purely melancholy, all enveloped in an air of taciturnity – you feel shimmers of icy wind passing through the bristly skin of your bare shins, devoid of any clothes, because you wear only a pair of shorts and an old hoodie of a dull, red and faded color that is not really yours over a thin plain tank top.

The hoodie doesn't smell like cigarettes, and it doesn't smell like you also. The scent that exudes from the fabric, after all, is hers, purely hers – like a memory that touches your skin, your bones.

This isn’t one of those nights that are too hot and not too cold, however, something that is reflected in your clothing choices; the comfortable and appreciative mood that blankets the entire dark city of New York is just inviting, you dare to think to yourself in your trains of thought that never stop. It's not very windy against your ankles or your weather-frozen cheekbones, but even so, your hair sways calmly, rustling behind your ears like a flag hoisted on a pole.

You just can't rest your head on the pillow to let yourself be carried away by the blandishments of sleep. So, after minutes or hours of staring at the boring monochrome ceiling above your bed with a restless agitation girdling the inside of your contrite chest, your time it is all spent on blunt remarks and mental notes made in your native language that at this point in life, might even sound like an alien to you – you get some of the word ordering wrong, while some elocution of others just sounds odd to your ears.

“Будь что будет.”

There is a slurred pause in your nasal speech, as if your tongue is catching between your teeth in the act of dancing against the roof of your mouth as you emulate the words that make up an ancient proverb, whose meaning you no longer quite remember correctly. And that prickly popular Sokovian dialect, colloquial in the most acute sense of the word and with a slightly less elaborate pronunciation and worthy of the lower classes, disappears little by little from your daily life like a healed and bleached scar, to which you cling like a grown child who carries with you a secure infantile memory, still so reluctant or even unable to let go of something that is no longer yours to hold on to.

You don't really have pleasant memories of your old Sokovian life in fact, so it even surprises you that something in you wants so much to keep a last shred of your cultural identity with you, that you don't want to let the world rob you of even that. Maybe, you think, maybe if you let the Sokovian go, you won't exist anymore. Something in you will change, and you will no longer be the person you know you are. And you also know that you're the stuck-up type of person, who doesn't handle change very well.

And then you talk again, again and again, like a broken record player. After all, you don't want to change.

Silence gives you permission to think calmly, like a bar company that eventually leaves you alone to drink your grievances from low-cut glasses. The view gives you a feeling of a fragile welcome; belonging to a collective kind of brings doses of contentment to your life. Although a lonely night is the inescapable epilogue to your existence according to the consequences of the actions that guided you in life, you like the vague idea of being a sociable animal, as the ancient philosophers would say.

From above, as if you were really omniscient or just an intangible deific figure, the big city is actually small and fragile, like a cornered sick person in dire need of protection – New York is just a black backdrop with tiny little lights encrusted along its entire length, like a long patchwork quilt rolled up in Christmas lights.

At this time of day, there are almost no good people to meet on the streets and you can hear a car horn and the screeching of tires running along the asphalt in the distance. Well, you think, what the hell.

Having retired the black outfit with indigo-detailed side stripes to the back of your wardrobe a while ago, inside a big dark bag, you just know that this is no longer a problem you have to solve. There's another range of masked and well-educated people hanging around, several of them younger and maybe a lot more willing, and you're no longer required to preserve the well-being of the life of the average New York citizen.

You then just snatch a thin cigarette with your right fingers from the half-crumpled wad of paper that was in the back pocket of your shorts and fit it through the gap between your lips, moving with the same expectant hand to the inside the single pocket of your hoodie, searching for the silver lighter in a dull action that already gives you a certain muscle memory when doing it.

Moving with your elbow, you bring the small metal accessory closer to your face, at the height of your chin, and sliding the cheek of your thumb across the stone you attempt to ignite a spark, but the attempt fails and you just grunt in discontent. The lighter clicks again, but one more time, there is no flicker to light your cigarette hanging from the middle of your mouth. The length of your fingers surrounded by a number of silver rings press tight against the metal of the tool.

“Dammit...”

There's a second frustrating attempt, and another one after that, and the third time is equally unsuccessful until you hear the doorbell chirp softly into the glass-and-concrete interior of the loft behind you, which is lit by low-yellow lighting that comes from a shy glowing globular lamp next to a spacious dark sofa. Your eyes leave the city to focus on the sound germ behind your back, turning with your chin over your right shoulder.

And you raise an eyebrow to the middle of your forehead, creasing the skin beam of your brow in disagreement because it's one-o'clock in the morning and someone's at your door, waiting for you – the cigarette blistered to your lips, so long ago forgotten; the lighter now lowered in your right hand in unconscious defeat.

The ethereal silence haunts the corners of the night, broken by the colorful phantasmagoric neon lights beamed from the tall imposing signs of Times Square. Your ears are as attentive as those of a guard dog, but at such a distance, no sound is picked up by your hearing ability, which is not one of your singular aptitudes, and, therefore, is restricted to the common and ordinary. And then, you aim your attentive gaze towards the front door. Something unsettling grips the walls of your stomach.

It doesn't take a considerable effort for the atoms that make up your body mass to become auspicious, changing and charging, and a spontaneous lapse that leaves a trail of blueish light in the physical space around you causes your molecules to reconstitute themselves in front of the light wooden door of the entrance of your house, in a usual teleportation that, thanks to your skills of a genetically altered human being, becomes customary in your daily reality.

In a heartbeat, without giving it much thought in a window of time as slim as the speed of the hands of a clock that exclusively ticks the seconds that pass, you disappear from the balcony in a kind of vortex, a crease in physical reality, only to reappear inside the loft, feeling the heated floor against your bare feet.

A distressing hesitation runs through the palm of your right hand as you lift it to thread your fingers around the cold metal of the knob, hovering it through the air before completing the act, open, as if waiting for the knob to come to your fingers. But your powers have honed in you a somewhat reckless nature that is already rooted within you, and the hardened life of a crime fighter has left you just a little bit tired for small, impassive combat.

After all, if you had to sum up the purposeful range of your abilities, you'd say your specialty lies in the act of running away. It only takes one thought for you to flee, for your body to dematerialize in one place only to consubstantiate in any remote location that your brain can imagine; from Siberia to Kazakhstan, from Patagonia to China, across the entire globe if necessary. Just an idea, a measly lucid thought, and the action will be done before you can even bat with your eyes.

So there's no real reason for the person behind the door to be a cause for concern on your part. Even if you still have to remind yourself of that fact again, again and again, hammering inside your skull before taking care of your unexpected visitor.

With your fingers now hooked around the doorknob, you turn the knuckle of your wrist to the side so that you are able to open the door which, once flung open, gives you the familiar sight of the apartment's dark hallway, greeting you with a blank look and darkened walls. And it's fuzzy for half a second until you reflexively bring your field of view down to your ribs, about the end of the hoodie laces that dangle across your chest.

And then a pair of emerald eyes stares back at you, so expectant and full of the glow of a life still so exciting to live, as if that piercing green wants to rip your soul out of your chest; it is a familiar shade of green that stands out in the eyes of a small child with profuse brown hair that falls in a fluid movement over her scrawny shoulders, the tip of her nose so similar to your own that it is even astonishing to see it elsewhere other than in your own bathroom mirror, early in the morning.

Greenish eyes, but then, your nose structure. You blink once. She wears tiny, unlaced red shoes that were a birthday present from her mother on her feet.

“Miss Y/l/n…”

A childish, hesitant voice greets you, which just doesn't sound all that comfortable in your presence – after all, to her you were never the warm and welcoming auntie Y/n, like the relationship she has with Natasha Romanoff or even Laura Barton, or any other title that she might link to your vague existence in her life. It was always just the cold, distant Ms. Y/l/n, lurking around corners like an ethereal shadow, avoiding her as if to ward off a contagious and deadly disease.

Timidly, her gaze strays to the side, behind thick, dark eyelashes, to the doorframe or the floor beneath your feet. Her small shoulders look hardened into the jacket she wears, as if her age-limited cognition isn't capable of crafting a conversation with you once the goal of finding you has been accomplished. And you recognize this little girl right away, like an animal of the same species that recognizes the other just by smell, just testing, trying to understand its fellow.

“Talia...?”

Her little freckled nose was certainly not an image that crossed your mind when you started to question who your mysterious night visitor behind that door might be. But you just know you need to call her mother right away.

ᗢ

The dull forest air, damp and suffocating, flooded your blunt lungs as if you were standing under the dark water of a deep, muddy river, your nose channel icy and blunt through the interior, causing you in the middle of your skull a mild annoying, clumsy migraine that was the harbinger of a coming illness – it came in warm through your mouth and came out cold through your nose, an exasperated sip of oxygen, with no purpose but to make you sick in the future.

Ahead of you ran a blur of green rows of brownish dark pine, a sickly greenish tinge like a wall of moss, transformed into huge demonic titans by the obscurity of dawn, passing so tediously fast through your eyes when your forearms were outlined around the athletic torso of Natasha Romanoff, the notorious figure who went by the name of Black Widow, in a sublimely shrewd vibe as you sailed through the mud; both of you stilted atop her bland motorcycle into the forest of Gloucastershire, remote in English lands.

Ahead of you, on the road of dust, dirt and dark stone that seemed to swallow up even the smallest remnant of a source of light and heat, glowed in cherry-red neon from the taillights of the other motorcycle that carried Steve Rogers, Captain America, resembling the shimmering eyes of a creature that would guide you through the pitch of the night in pursuit of your goal—the prominent shield on his back reflecting hues of red, white, and blue toward you, twinkling with the star honorably encrusted in the right middle of the polychromatic circle molded in pure vibranium.

And growing on the horizon, at the top of a green hill with airs of mystery, a castle of an immemorial Victorian structure that, being owned by members of the HYDRA institution, was the base that contained in itself, well protected inside its stone walls and high monumental towers like a paranoid medieval king, a recent scientific invention that was allegedly capable of ruining your entire team and subordinating any form of government, coercing the geopolitical map in favor of those who held a monopoly on it. And just the thought of an instrument of that scale (Project Nocturne, as Black Widow told you) made a knot in the pit of your stomach.

The consensus was unanimous and indisputable, when Natasha came from those British lands having succeeded in usurping the information after a long month all devoted to her undercover work; a weapon with such a range of power should be taken out of the jurisdiction of an organization as oblivious to the rest of humanity as HYDRA was, which is why Nick Fury had assigned you and your colleagues (an elite team, sure, the Avengers) to extract the device from inside the castle and destroy it as soon as possible.

So, all you had to do was teleport and, with such an object in hand, your team would leave in retreat. Whatever this dreaded object was.

“Are you ready for action, teleport girl?” Natasha craned her neck towards you, speaking over her curious shoulder, a short-cropped beam of windblown red hair streaming through her speech.

And she saw that, in your features, a greedy, ill-tempered discontent rose and grew.

“T-that's not my name…”

But Agent Romanoff only laughed softly, her leather-gloved hands screwed tightly to the dark rubber-covered motorcycle handlebars, fire-colored hair bouncing in the crisp wind like the crackling flames of a bonfire.

The bike tore through the tall, vast forest for a few more miles and seconds before a guttural roar rumbled through the leaves and branches, loud as an explosion, and the notion descended upon you that Bruce had gone off to some dark corner inside the his own mind, and his alter ego was now the one who took possession of the one body that was circumscribed between two opposite mentalities; the sapient Doctor Banner and the neanderthal green Hulk creature, in a discrepant duality, a dynamic similar to the strange case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

And that was the signal (or you thought so, anyway).

And then, closing your eyelids, you teleported into a blue streak of reality melting away, leaving Natasha to be the only one on the motorcycle. And inside the castle where you jumped smelled of dewy earth, dust, and polished stone. You snorted once, taking in a huge gulp of dusty air; polluted oxygen crammed the pathways into your lungs, also smelling the still-fresh aroma of hot gunpowder wafting through the air.

But something hit you squarely in the middle of your black-and-blue rubber-covered chest half a second later, not even giving you any thought as your ribcage sank inward in a dangerous tingle, pushing all the air out of your chest, lungs flattened against your back like two balloons. It hurt like getting a cannonball shot in the ribs, the weight of invisible lead crushing into your upper bones.

A shimmering scarlet nebula was what that coaxed your body away, propelling you at violent speed across the room, where the muscles of your back met the frame of a splintered wooden table in a thudding collision – a cloud of dust rose from the plaster on the wall as you and the table slammed into the polished stone.

A pained growl escaped your throat as the sting from the blow started a rumbling pain at the top of your neck in a fiery whiplash. Inside your eardrums there was a horrible humming sound and, for a second, a faint seemed to be an imminent reality for you.

“B-but—” you huffed in a tiny voice on a breath coming from behind your tongue, huddled on the floor amidst table debris and dust pellets like a dirty old rag, “What the fuck was that?!”

And the figure set before you, your attacker, of course, could be none other than Wanda Maximoff, who had both hands raised in a solid lunging pose, forearms straight and precise in your direction, while a splash of piercing red color circled the moss green of her irises. It was like a swamp on fire inside her eye sockets, a will-o'-the-wisp that wanted to consume you completely. She looked serious and stern, almost as if just to prove that she had complete control over her own pulsing mystical powers.

The young woman looked prepared for the slaughter like a creature out of a nightmare, for a moment seeming to have awakened a slumbering ruffian nature within her, still with dancing crimson mist tracing the length of her upraised fingers, clad in a fistful of silver rings of the most diverse shapes and sizes, as if prepared to unleash a new burst of throbbing energy at any given moment.

But she let her shoulders sag as she realized that the target of her attack had only been you, a teammate of hers poorly mistaken for a malefactor in the heat of the moment; her hands hanging to the sides of the dark red coat that wore the length of her arms, spilling even towards the crook of her knees tucked into tight dark pants that allowed greater mobility when on the front lines of the battlefield.

And what was once concern writing its way down the length of Wanda's pretty face, with solid, sharp, even half-feline features, took on airs of crimson ferocity as she creased her dark brows in the middle of her forehead, watching you barely set standing, covered in a layer of dust and, well, a shameful defeat.

“What the hell, Y/n, what do you think you're doing?!” she scolded, stomping towards you with the combat boots she was wearing, “I could have killed you!”

“I know, dammit! That's why I asked what the fuck was that!” You gestured angrily with your hands raised towards her, who stopped right next to you.

“You knew I was going to jump in here! That's literally the damn plan, Wanda! Stick to the damn plan!”

But she just tilted her chin to the side of her left shoulder and sipped at a smoldering impetuosity that vibrated red inside her, as if buying the conflict you were selling. If at one point she had really cared about your well-being, now she just seemed capable of hitting you one more time on purpose.

“And you knew I'd have to clear the room before you jump in, Y/n!” she barked back then, in an equally irritated tone, her eyes a bright green sparkling and turbulent, “It was you who didn't wait for my signal, because everything with you is like that! You don't know how to wait for anything! You don't know how to work as a team!”

“I don't know how to work as a team?! Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know that working as a team meant I had to wait for you to feel like trying to do something to get into action on a mission that literally has to be done in the shortest possible time!” was your infuriated reply, which comes along with the flush of the skin on your cheeks.

“I’m sorry if the best I can do isn’t enough for you!” she accused, “But it’s not like anything in the world is ever enough for you, right, Y/n?!”

“Well, if you didn't just stay looking after Vision in every practice and work your ass out like the rest of the team, maybe then you'd be more agile on the field! That sure would be enough right now!”

But there was a tone of taciturnity that engulfed her fierce body language at your speech, taking on a predator's edge, and the low voice provided by her was shaped like a warm whisper, a warning and a threat blended into one amalgamation of dread that icy down the length of your spine, going even farther and, dare you say, even jabbing slightly between your legs. Your palms felt sticky against the rubber of your suit, lowering your composure a little before her.

“Don't you dare bring Vision into this.”

You, in turn, still hostile and certainly annoyed, opened and closed your mouth for a while, but there was nothing more to say once Wanda's tone ended up taking your speech, slaying it inside your throat as if her magic had suddenly ripped your tongue out. And for a brief second, the high dark collar of your uniform felt like a rope tightening around the outline of your neck.

Your rebuttal, however, didn't come because it was Tony Stark's voice that reverberated through your communicator tucked into your ear canal, and through hers as well. Your attention strayed from Wanda for half a second.

“Lovebirds, I know it's awkward to live with an ex in the workplace – trust me, you'll never want to date your secretary – but if you don't mind, let's just fulfill our mission and get out of here as soon as possible, all right? In the compound you two can fight a little longer. Geez, I’ll even make you two a coffee myself.”

You looked at her and she looked at you. And, at the same speed, the two proud looks drenched in a mutual meaning drifted away, as if dodging a common adversity that would never be resolved if what was needed to do so was an apology that would guarantee a good coexistence. You wouldn’t say she was your ex, but Wanda would say you were hers. Maybe if you were more mature, maybe if she wasn’t so rash. Maybe if you just listened to each other more.

At that time in your life you were just too presumptuous, the vigor imbued in youth bringing a certainty of self that would prove to be harmful at several later moments, and one of Wanda's most infuriating flaws was that the dark-haired young woman never liked to admit a mistake made by herself. And so, just like that, you were in a limbo, in an endless loop within a quarrel that had arisen on both sides.

The sex was good, sure, but the feelings imbued in the act were just too arduous to digest – when you wanted her she didn’t want you back, and when she wanted you, well, you just went away.

She took a step away from you, who also had no intention of being so close to her as you carried a bundle of conflicting feelings within your heart, and they were all aimed solely and exclusively at Wanda. You could kiss her and then curse her like flipping a switch.

“Let's just… go,” she muttered, rather tough into her speech, “Let's find what we came to find and just get the hell out of here. This place gives me chills…”

And began a joint search for the entire perimeter that made up the ancient castle, for what neither you nor she knew well what it was. And the notion burned within your larynx that once your unflattering esteem for one another had been withheld within you for the sake of the smooth running of teamwork, reserving lapses of discord for more propitious moments than that, you and Wanda, as in a bad joke made by fate, worked well together, like two halves that, when put together, make up a fully functioning whole.

If she attacked, you defended, and if you defended, she attacked. And together you advanced, traversing the circuit of stone and wood walls. It was like a well-planned dance, a meeting of minds, a rehearsed joining of souls; you didn't need to think to act, because she thought for you. A tune that, in the past, would have been pleasant to experience.

And she looked just so beautiful, so sumptuous, when brandishing with her bare hands to fire twirls of red energy that pumped from within her wills. Her pale face kind of shimmered with a layer of warm sweat on a bead of skin on her forehead, just beyond the roots of the dark hair that swung around the outline of her face, in a facial expression where concentration was written in scarlet lines, as her lids tightened around her soften eyes and her dark brows creased in search of a new target to hit in a fervent mystical ambition.

When she shielded you with a barrier of shimmering crimson fog that sheltered you from a hail of gunfire, turning her head over her right shoulder to check your physical well-being in a lapse of smoldering concern, you were remembered why your heartstrings had been pulled by her fingertips like a master puppeteer some time ago, not long enough to be completely forgotten, veiled and overcome.

“I can– I can handle it here!” it was a roar over the burst of machine guns springing into action, “Go ahead, Y/n!”

“N–no, no way! No!” you reiterated exasperatedly, “I'm not leaving you here by yourself, Wanda! Don’t ask me to do this!”

“Y/n,” she looked at you, armed with certainty in the deep green that bathed her irises, “I'll be fine, I promise. Now please, just go!”

The conversation that took place was without a word to be heard. But there was no hesitation; you trusted her in that moment, concurring at her with a nod of your head, just as Wanda trusted you too. And the spontaneous teleport was quick and accurate as your body mass melted in midair, like a dart hitting the red center of a target, the last sight being Wanda's dark hair cascading down the middle of her back.

And a sudden ghostly aura froze the hollow of your bones as you found yourself away from Wanda and the battalion of soldiers she promptly held off just with the willpower of her own mind. The room you jumped into was excruciating like a scream in the dark, and just as terrifying.

Melancholic as the last moments of life of a flower withering, and that brought you an ominous unruly nostalgia, referring in unhealthy memory to the moments when you found yourself lost in the deep solitude of your own cell in the HYDRA laboratory facilities – a frightening placethat accommodated you for so long that you even lost count, with stone walls and tears, martyring yourself for what you could never have (freedom or companionship, there was never absolute certainty).

Both, perhaps, you came to think later, as you stared at the ceiling as you lay down to die in your ridiculous excuse for what would be the most uncomfortable of beds.

Being there, in that dark room, for you at least, was as horrible as your teenage days, in a sultry temperature so unvarying and constant that a handful of a few strands of your hair stuck to the skin of your neck, covered by an invisible layer of icy sweat; anxiety pumping through your veins at yet another round of tests with the Mind Stone they'd stolen at the time, as your ears used to hear the footsteps pouring down the hall.

So much trial and error, so many failures and punishments, that you, at the time, believed that at some point your whole body would just completely disintegrate, vanishing from reality for good.

The strained vision of your clever eyes, beneath your eyelashes, could not discern even any direction to guide yourself through the darkness that seemed to surround you like an enigmatic augury creature, with uncertain and unpredictable attitudes – a blatant odor that seemed exhale right next to your shoulders, covering you in a cloak of rot, coming from the uncertain cylindrical stone walls that insisted on squeezing you into the mouth of hell.

The fog in the bowels of the earth just wasn't getting any worse, so deep and extemporaneous, because the presence of a unknown creature huddled against one of the corners of the four crammed walls was what caught your attention right away, just a shy silhouette in the dark, which could not be distinguished as anything other than a shadowy, shapeless mass. And you dared to approach, because if this was the fifteenth room on the seventh floor, the weapon of global domination would be there.

“What… what the...?”

As the sole of your boot took a step towards it, the thing squeaked like a harassed guinea pig, even seeming to melt and disappear into the wall it leaned against. And carefully, you approached. As you crouched on your knees, a wave of sudden nauseating vertigo ebbed down your esophagus as the light found your gaze amid the emptiness of the dark room. A small, freckled, little girl's face quivered before your gaze as the tiny chin found itself supplanted by a pair of bony sore knees, thick eyelashes hidden behind a curtain of lank, greasy, long dark hair.

But the eyes were green, like two jade stones set in a filthy receptacle that didn't match the preciousness of those irises soaked in a thin, misty layer of tears that she fought to not to shed in front of you – perhaps from fear, or perhaps from trauma, surely from both, never from less than either.

Her malnourished little body was covered only by a single piece of a damp, dirty cloth, and signs of fatigue that should never show on a child's facial expressions marred her tapered cheeks and thin, pale skin, as would be that of an ill person lying on their deathbed. You wanted to throw up all the contents of the dinner that were churning the inside of your stomach. You realized, with trembling hands, that this thing (this kid) was Project Nocturne.

“But it's a child...” was a thoughtless whisper, “It's... it's just a child...”

ᗢ

The return of a successful mission had never felt so unnerving in your guts before; why, of course, you found yourself in the strange presence of one more figure than the amount of people who had gone inside the jet hours before, a new creature to inhabit the interior of the quinjet with you and your teammates. It was as if everyone knew what it was that concerned them as a collective, but no one was bold enough to say it out loud. You just understood each other’s apprehension in silence.

The tension overwrought in the air that enveloped you could even be tangible, since all the adults present ended up peeking curious glances at the quiet little girl who was covered by a thick dark wool blanket that had been laid around her skinny shoulders, making her look like a tiny caterpillar inside a cocoon with only a pair of pea green eyes sticking out her shell, watching everyone like a suspicious radar.

Wanda was the one who assumed the position of a tutor towards the child when no one else did, even if not for lack of initiatives by people like Natasha and Steve or even Clint, who was a father himself; the girl would not allow herself to be touched by anyone other than the enchantress without bursting out shrieking, and then Wanda was the one who, between the fingers of her hand, rewarded the withered palm of her downcast left tiny hand all the way until you arrived at your required location, back in American lands.

There was a comfort in Wanda's warm welcome that promptly convinced her that she was a pleasant presence, worthy of her trust so difficult to bestow on other unfamiliar adults; by nature, the child was frightened and weepy, and for that you all didn’t bat an eyelid, since everyone understood well the situation – you, even more so. And they were indeed alike, the little girl and Wanda, in a way that would raise eyebrows in acts of wonder, for they were too similar even for your own taste.

It made you think that Wanda, who had once been a child as young as that one, must have contained facial features similar to those of the young girl with an unhealthy face dotted with a galaxy of scanty brown freckles, and from the witch she only lacked in the familiar structure of her nose, which you weren't quite sure at the time to distinguish from who it was that reminded you so much; the answer looking like it wanted to scratch out of your memory, yet too uncertain to voice your thoughts out loud.

The girl settled in the compound because it was necessary, because there was no other place for her to fit in the world; in fact, they made her settle down. But as long as she was accompanied by Wanda, looking at the adult woman in question or seeking permission and comfort with those big verdant doe eyes, she was able to cooperate with others without showing any signs of rejection.

In part, you assumed it had to do with the fact that, once inside the HYDRA labs, she hadn't been granted choices in her very modest lifetime, and that's why she didn't know empirically that she was actually able to decline what adults offered her – according to Dr. Banner, after a previous session of physical tests passed all well accompanied by Wanda's watchful gaze, the girl was an average of seven years old, despite being quite stunted and undernourished for the age.

And the more days took slashes of weeks, the more and more she became a shadow that mirrored Wanda's actions, perhaps like an insecure duckling that follows its mother around or even a tiny puppy too young for its own good, still discovering so much of what the world had to offer. She was like a magnet drawn to the figure of her assumed guardian, a shadow sneaking behind the older woman's hip.

And Wanda seemed to enjoy every moment of it, because you watched her from afar, like a specter that doesn’t let go of the past to suitably move forward, when she took the girl for a walk in the outside gardens that surrounded the perimeter that made up the massive structures of the compound, or when she carried a sleeping little body so close to her own chest as if she were going to keep the girl inside her embrace until the last day of the Earth, heading to the room they shared to get her little girl ready for bed.

Wanda stopped attending other missions after a while, putting all her spare time into raising that child. And she's also definitely stopped reaching out to you to fulfill her lonely demands, for you to kiss her out of need or reward her with an orgasm that would consume the nightly necessity inside her, as she's done so many times before. She never went back for the rings she left on your nighstand or the red hoodie she left hanging on that chair in the corner of your room.

But one day when you were slinging athletic clothes around your body still sharp after a long morning of training spent in the company of Sam and Natasha, wearing a brief layer of sweat on the greasy skin of your forehead, you found yourself making a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch in the empty kitchen, to replenish your energies. That was when a sudden magnetic sensation took hold of your state of consciousness, sweeping away from your tired muscles the prostrate fatigue that required a very welcome break.

It was as if something called you; something that went beyond the barriers of what is tangible and material. It was a psychic need that itched to be attended.

So you turned around, in a blind search for what was inviting you in your unconscious. And, there, cohabiting the same space as you, could only be seen the figure of the little girl protected by Wanda, green irises wandering over your face in front of a childish and curious look, which seemed to digest the atmosphere in search of what connected her to you.

Your eyes bonded with hers in a flicker of gaze, and for a brief lapse of a second, there was a hesitation on your part that ended up tensing the muscles in your back beneath the thin layer of clothing provided by a tank top that left a lot of your skin showing. She looked healthier in that moment, her cheeks flushed and full, her hair glossy resulting from a good affectionate treatment, so dissimilar from that day when she was nothing less than an animal backed up against a dark corner in front of you.

She was quiet and apprehensive, as if waiting for your belated initiative toward herself.

“H–hey, kid,” you mussed, probing the area around her tiny body for Wanda, who was nowhere to be seen.

“Are you... are you alone? Are you lost? I mean, the compound can be quite big, huh... I honestly never thought we needed all this space, but you know how Tony is... but hey, where’s your– where’s Wanda?”

But the girl continued to maintain an air of silence towards you, only batting her thick dark eyelashes. And it was no surprise to you, in fact, the lack of response; until then, you had never heard her voice. You barely knew if she was really capable of understanding whatever was that you emulated concerning her in your second language, as Wanda used to communicate only in her Sokovian dialect with the girl.

“Що з вами?” You tried again, questioning her need for something.

And then she looked at the sandwich laid out on the plate in front of you on the counter, which was cut into two pieces made up of golden bread stuffed with melted cheese, a certain sheet of curiosity gleaming in her eyes. Your poor interpretation of signs dismissed it as a mute request, and so you took the sandwich in your hands and held it up into her field of view.

“Do you… do you want a piece of it…? ти хочеш?” On the girl's part there was the slightest nod, “Right, here.”

You offered her a slice of your sandwich, which was welcomed by two small hands raised in your direction as if asking for a hug.

You were the first to take a bite of the bread and, closely watched by the stimulated gaze of the girl, who was a born observer, she opened her mouth and sank her teeth into the sandwich just like you previously did, before chewing and swallowing in a studying way, as if it were that a scientific experiment. And then, after the experience had made her a connoisseur of the taste of grilled cheese, there was one more bite on her part, followed by another almost exasperatedly, which elicited a silly chuckle on your part.

Faced with the sound you made, the girl looked at you like a curious puppy and “Happy?” was what she asked, to which you only raised an uncertain brow.

"What? If I’m happy?”

Again, she nodded in agreement, rocking her silky dark hair that had recently been trimmed at the ends, looking gleaming and soft to the touch. And for a second, you didn't know what to say. She was a child, and you might as well lie. But you knew you weren't really happy, and maybe that wasn't even exactly what she meant with her vague knowledge of words in another language, but the question snuck into you and crept into your brain, planting seeds there that would later come to fruition, taking root in a bad feeling inside you.

“Well, you see, I... I...” Your mouth opened, but then closed shortly after, in a piercing, dysfunctional silence. There was nothing to say, not in front of her.

“Talia!” Wanda's voice, a little worried in its tonality bordering on maternal, reached your ears before she herself did it inside the kitchen, in quick and teasing steps.

And she barely glanced at you, because she got down on her knees to crouch in front of the child (Talia), so that she could hold the outlines of the girl's face in the warm palms of her hands.

“Are you okay, sweetie? You can't just walk away like that, I was worried to death! I swear, sometimes it's like you just go from one place to another,” the tone, however, was not harsh or ferocious; it was just tender, comfortable, oozing characters of thoughtfulness to the little girl, “Please don't ever do that again. I don't want you to get lost or out of my sight, okay?”

“Mama,” Her tiny voice rang out, causing a crease of brows on your part, who watched the interaction between the pair like a distant witness. The girl waved the remains of her bitten sandwich in front of Wanda's face before turning to you.

And then two sets of equally expectant, olive green eyes were like a spotlight burning your skin, Wanda suddenly aware of your presence inside the kitchen. But soon, her attention was all on the child again. Maybe, you thought years later, maybe she just didn't want to tell you what she's kind of suspected for a while at that point, as a magical sixth sense for the connection beyond the material plane that bound your vitalities.

“Oh, did Y/n get you a sandwich?” Talia nodded, something she seemed to do a lot, and Wanda's eyes brightened a jade color filled with tenderness for the little child before her, “And did you thank her? It's important to thank people when they give you things, polite people do that. And you're a polite little girl, aren't you, baby? Скажи спасибі, Крошка.”

Again, the little girl looked at you, seeming a little doubtful with a small flash of skin creased in between her thin brows just like you did too, as if the thoughts behind her eyes didn't match the words that might slip through her rosy button lips. And you, in turn, just raised a placating palm toward her before the evident lump of anxiety forming inside her chest grew to overwhelming proportions.

“It's okay,” you shrugged casually, “No need to say it out loud, kiddo, I understand your good intention. You don't seem to be much for words at all, right? It’s okay. Все добре.”

Wanda got to her feet again, stretching her knees into the dark jeans she wore on her attractive legs, before the palm of her right hand began the act of stroking the top of Talia’s head of soft brown hair, in a placid and unconscious action, bringing the little child close to her, beside her hipbone.

“Silence is her way of dealing with things,” are the first words Wanda says to you in days, casually holding eye contact with you, “Nat said it's common for kids who've been through... you know, what she's been through, to use it as a way of coping with all that happened with them.”

In the face of the conversation, the girl took another bite of the piece of grilled bread placed between her little hands. Wanda smiled at Talia's actions.

“But we're making progress, aren't we?” and her grin seemed so beautiful, so pure and genuine when directed at the girl, as if she were her greatest achievement in life, her primary source of affection and care, “She can already say a few words in English and associate them with what is happening around her. Talia is a very smart girl.”

“Talia, huh?” you repeated the name which, in a way, sounded right in your pronunciation. Wanda nodded, bouncing with the strands of her long, dark hair.

“Yeah, I'm not calling her a project like Bruce and Tony,” the green in her eyes looked unerring as she looked at you, looking so devout in her actions, “She’s not a lab rat, she’s a child. My… my child. And her name is Talia.”

“Right,” you mussed, because there was nothing more to say beyond that, “Talia. It’s… it’s a great name.”

ᗢ

The stone-walled interior of the cell that housed you was gloomy and damp, back in the days when you found yourself captive to the will of a man whose name, to you, has never been more than something like Strucker. He was a baron, perhaps—you had once heard someone refer to him in an air of military respect for such a title, the lowest in the entire nobility hierarchy.

There were no signs of comfort that could be pinpointed in any of the scrawny compost that made up the length, width, or height of those claustrophobic walls that closed in stone against you; it was like an empty, cold coffin, buried six feet away, beneath the glow of the last ray of surface sunlight. The HYDRA base that contained your cell had a dense, compact and sawn atmosphere, being devoured by the bowels of the earth where the impure air was thick and burning, so difficult to inhale by all that dirty dust.

It was an environment so harsh that had the air of a ghost town, even though life there proliferated in an unruly way, in anguished heaps, one on top of the other as if the intention were to reach the exteriority of the surface; although the laboratories were so deep and so submerged that it became increasingly almost impossible to glimpse their true abyssal depths and the most hideous monstrosities that there, in the shadows, hid from the eyes of the world. The most grotesque experiments that a human being would be capable of performing on another similar to themselves.

You, at that time, were never quite sure how much time had passed since your addition to that circus of horrors whose master of ceremonies was Strucker himself, the mastermind and employer; of how many weeks made up the months that constituted the years since your arrival at that place – your meager notion of the passage of time, always deprived of the notions of the sun and the hands of a clock, took the form of the perception of biological changes that had taken place in your own body.

The way your hair looked lengthier and greasier, or the way the ends of your chipped nails grew longer out of the edges of your fingers. The way the thin flesh of your cheeks tapered in signs of long-term malnutrition, or how, by the cuts characteristics of age, your physical structure took on more adult bearings that moved further and further away from the extremities of the epilogues of childhood, the time of life when you were still enjoying your remote time of freedom in a war-torn country, living off the crumbs of starving poverty.

A translucent droplet of warm sweat trickled down the line of your stiff, dirty, perspiring face, slipped down the curve of your chin, and then splattered onto the filthy floor between your bare feet. Something tucked within your insides just held back the full notion that they were going to come to escort you to that bigger room, to force you to touch that damned stone one more time, only to, after you did, put you through a bunch of exhausting tests that would border on imminent death. Boundaries didn't apply to you, who was just someone else's possession.

You held your breath as the heavy cell door clicked open. If this was a day seven days after the last time it had happened, it meant they were going to screw thick leather straps into your wrists and ankles to keep you stabilized on an ice-cold stretcher, when a masked man would come to stick a large needle in the middle of your back muscles again, to extract some strange spinal fluid from inside your vertebrae. It's not just because you had already been subjected to several rounds of this same nefarious procedure that your body had become accustomed to such an invasion.

A muffled clang rang through the room, your awed squeals echoing through its stone walls – a pair of uniformed men dragged you by your bony wrists down the scrawny hallway out of the cell.

“Поспішай, блін!” A gunman yelled in your ear, causing you to cower into your thin single piece of dirty, torn clothing, before shoving your skinny shoulder out of the cell.

The oxygen supplied in your lungs, roaming between the cells, took on a rigorously cold and even hard shape, quite difficult to breathe in or aspire with full propriety, weighing the sharpness of your fearful chest when your anxious eye could distinguish, between the quick blinks that pushed away the veil of darkness that clouded your mind, the shimmering shade of vivid green in the midst of the icy spectrum of darkness that crammed every square meter that made up the long corridor; the gloom entering your pores and choking you in a pool of fear.

They were, those impious orbs turned towards you, like true beacons that stared at the core of your soul in an apathetic emerald light. A color of green that saw everything, from which nothing escaped alive, overflowing with a hatred for the world that had taken everything from her, had wrested so much from her. The eyes of that girl who looked about your age (even if as dejected as your own body was in), a volunteer you knew, who had been housed in a cell next to yours.

She was also escorted by a pair of armed guards, heading in the opposite direction to where you were forced to go as on death row – the two predatory eyes, however, luminous, fearsome and incisive, were the most pronounced feature of a pale face like wax, devoid of sun, flanked by strands of long, straight brown hair lacking the graces of vain care. Rumor had it that the stone had detached itself from Loki’s scepter and ambled towards her, that she didn't have to touch it directly like you had.

And for a brief lapse of a second, you felt magnetically drawn to the gravitational field around her like the rings of Saturn, like the very Mind Stone that had floated into her touch. The unsettling urge was electric in you who, panting in anguish, only cherished touching the chalk skin of the girl who passed you in the hallway. And she looked at you expectantly, as if she were also attracted to you. Seconds dragged by like a tortoise as eye contact was sustained between you and Wanda, whose face you only knew at the time, not the name.

Later, with the two of you freed from Strucker's clutches and her brother deceased after a blunt clash with Ultron (which cost you both your hometown and then your whole country), you learned that your connection to Wanda was in the energy of the Mind Stone contained in your genes and hers too. Maybe that's why something in you never got tired of her, that always craved more of her, for consuming her completely until the two of you were one whole. Maybe you just didn’t want to admit that you loved her on your own.

Perhaps that was why your gaze could never stray from Wanda playing afar with Talia in the company of Vision, the three of them sitting on the grass in the garden outside, in the sun like a family, while you were the ghost in the window, inside the compound – the synthezoid whose very body of green wires, yellow blood, and red bones was the embodiment of the Mind Stone receptacle that was embedded in the middle of his forehead, flashing a sickening neon yellow.

You never once failed to notice how he made her dawn on such a beautiful smile, while you only made her sad, stressed or anxious. You wanted her to smile like that for you.

“Why the long face, teleport girl?”

Natasha's voice came from behind your shoulders, when the woman older than you, who was stealing pecks from a cup full of coffee supplanted by the fingers of her right hand, come to accompany you to the huge window view.

“The little witch and her toaster boyfriend, huh? Such an unusual couple.”

“She looks happy,” you mussed, still not meeting the redhead's gaze, always watching Wanda like a security camera, “They... they seem like a happy family.”

“Well, she really got attached to that little girl. It’s cute to see, I guess. But looking happy doesn't mean being really happy,” was the Widow's reply, followed by a long swig of warm coffee, “You know that, don't you, Y/n?"

She looked at you like she wanted to say something she didn't. But it was about a few days later, inside the excruciating walls of your room one night after dinner (Tony had ordered shawarmas and fries for the entire team), when your unwary eyes darted toward the wall in front of you.

You blinked slowly, and then took a gulp of bored air, the room as quiet and dark as a crypt. The silver light of the innocuous moonlight crept between the thick curtains like a curious little animal, adorning the room in a bright, luminous color, creating a shading effect from the sparse furniture placed there, even if it wasn't these the major components of the room's decorations – the numbers “21” and “35” in neon green glittered on the dim face of your digital clock placed on the headboard just beside your bed, next to a porcelain lamp.

“Miss Y/l/n?” FRIDAY 's somewhat machine-like female voice, the artificial intelligence that governs each and every technological apparatus in the compound, entreated you, echoing into the walls of your room.

“Mr. Stark has asked to inform you that he requests your presence in the east wing laboratory right now.”

Your answer came in the form of a lame growl squeezed out of your throat.

“Tell him that tomorrow morning I’ll talk to him, please. I'm not in the mood for it right now.”

“Miss Y/l/n,” the voice repeated, in a slightly more insistent tone, “Mr. Stark has asked me to indefinitely turn off the power to your room if you refuse. He says it is a matter of the utmost importance.”

“Well shit...”

You got to your feet and lazily slipped on your half-worn shoes forgotten by the side of the bed, not going to the extra trouble of tying your loose shoelaces. The east wing was allocated away from the heroes' quarters situated in the west wing, and going with your legs there didn't seem all that attractive (although you didn't have much choice in doing so), opting to envision the room for that, like a snap of your fingers, you would teleport there without too many circumlocutions built into your apathetic actions.

This was a vast room lit by a layer of long white lamps, adorned with glass and holograms in eerie, flashing neon colors that floated at eye level, lined with shelves crammed with electronics and glass containers, tiny test tubes and Bunsen burners all with faded flames, in addition to other devices of a modern high technology that were not at all recognizable by your poor cognition about that area. To you, that place has always looked more like the interior of a spaceship than a laboratory itself.

Tony could be found there, close to Bruce and also Steve, but the presence that surprised you the most was Wanda, who wore an open dark sweater on her torso whose sleeves went beyond the limit of her wrists, partially engulfing the palms of both her hands. Illuminated by the artificial light of the room, her eyes seemed even more green and penetrating, always exuding airs of that relaxed beauty that seemed to be carved into her bones.

Her gaze caught you in silence, and you didn't say anything either before your attention turned to Tony, who came to meet you. He wore a classic rock band shirt, one of several that had always made up his playboy wardrobe.

“Ah, you're finally here teleport girl, I thought I'd have to make Cap go to your room and yank you out of bed by your ankles. I don't know how to deal with cranky teenagers, sorry.”

“I’m an adult.”

“Yeah, and I keep forgetting that,” and then he turned his back on you, heading towards Bruce, who in turn seemed so intent on the open projections running through the interface of an interactive table (rectangular in shape and flat surface), to which he conveyed all the annotations made until then.

"Well, now that you're both here, Rogers, will you do the honors of telling the two lovebirds about what we've discovered, please?"

“What you’ve… discovered…?” Wanda said then, in a puzzled, curious tone of question that was aimed at Steve, with whom she was closest of the three men in the room.

The Captain, with his sturdy arms crossed over his Herculean chest buttoned up in a pale shirt, only nodded in the slightest movement of his head toward the young brunette woman. He looked apprehensive about doing so.

“Yeah, well,” he began his speaking with typical speech tones, “It's related to the girl, Wanda. Talia. You know that our agreement with the government after Lagos is that we must give them the reports of all our missions, right?”

“Yes, I... I know.”

The answer was in a regretful thread of voice that urged you to look at her. There was something gloomy that crept like a worm through the sullen green of her eyes and, looking so small, she stared at her palms for half a second, before the tips of her right fingers reflexively brushed to fidget with the silver rings that adorned the extension of her left fingers.

For a brief lapse of a moment, you wanted to bring her into the comfort of your arms and place a warm kiss on the crown of her brown-haired head to lull her to your mainstay, and to keep your hands from doing so, you just stuck them inside the back pockets of the baggy, ripped pale jeans that buttoned at your hips. You shifted your chin to the side of your right shoulder, just so you wouldn’t see her still silhouette like a nostalgic flavor memory in your peripheral vision, in the corner of your mind.

“It turns out that our friends at the Pentagon took an interest in keeping the girl,” it was Tony's turn to say.

“They said we can't keep an underage immigrant without legal status under our jurisdiction, not without the accompaniment of a parent or a legal guardian. They want her transferred to a CBP shelter under the jurisdiction of the Department of Health and Human Services. You know, that bullshit from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, stuff like that.”

“Which means she will either be deported or fall into the system. Probably deported,” your voice doesn't sound like your own as it comes out of the back of your throat, shrugging into your old punk rock band-print shirt.

Wanda's exasperated gaze ached in an anxiety building in the pit of her stomach as she, who was standing next to your left shoulder, stared at your profile in an afflicted way. Not looking back at her felt like fuel for her dread, which felt larger and more unstable inside her chest like a red balloon filled with oxygen, about to burst with a loud pop.

“W-what...? No, they– they can’t–” and then she turned her head towards the Captain, “Steve, please, they can't– she can't be without me! Please, she’s just a child!”

“They won't, Wanda,” he assured her when her dark brows creased into an anguished facial expression.

“Because that's where things start to get interesting,” says Tony, with a diligent little smile glistening from under his neatly trimmed goatee, “Right, Banner?”

“Yes indeed,” was Dr. Banner's reply in his lethargic mannerism, who turned to you and Wanda as well, aiming the big square glasses blistered on the bridge of his nose in your direction, “It's an incredible advance in biology, I have to say.”

When Wanda glanced at you from the corner as if to study your reaction, you didn't look back, just sloping curiously towards the face of the accomplished scientist in the buttoned shirt with sleeves rolled up at the elbows and shabby cashmere shoes.

“I had to do a genetic mapping on the girl to find out what her origins were and preferably, with any luck, find her parents or any living relatives to contact. But what I found was, well... it was interesting, to say the least. The girl has no parents, not in the conventional sense of the word. She has gene donors. FRIDAY, please.”

“As you wish, Doctor Banner.”

The machine voice followed the call of the man with short dark hair, streaked with bands of gray, in an articulate fidelity, always so devout, and from the projector placed inside the interactive table's display, a brilliant hologram was produced, made in dazzling blue and opalescent white, detailed in its smallest details, to which it presented a 3D model of a DNA structureright in front of the avid emerald eyes that possessed the ingenious Wanda, who studied completely the holographic reproduction made available to her by artificial intelligence.

You weren't quite sure what the hell that in front of your eyes meant, but a flicker of curiosity that welled up in your gut allowed you to give Bruce a chance to talk more about his research.

“These, as you can see, are Talia's genotypes. Her genetic makeup,” clarified the bespectacled man, as if to lighten the glint of misunderstanding that shone in your irises.

“According to the notes we got from HYDRA's castle, Project Nocturne was a series of attempts to artificially reproduce the genetics of responsive test subjects from experiments performed with the Mind Stone a few years ago. I mean, well, you two and Pietro.”

The mention of Wanda's late older twin was sudden, something that caught her off guard – you've noticed it because you've noticed when she looks away, still so distraught over the lack of the late speedster boy, whose body lay in ancient Sokovian lands. Your hand pulsed to intertwine your fingers with hers. She used to seek your embrace to cry into the nights when the nostalgic regret of the lack that her brother caused inside her bones slipped through her.

“The initial idea of the project was to reproduce Wanda's DNA, who was the subject with the highest response rate to the experiments, as a kind of cloning procedure, but the incomplete DNA sequences they extracted from her required that the gaps in her sequences were filled with other DNA, and as it would be fruitless to do so with Pietro's because of inbreeding, they used your DNA for that, Y/n."

You blinked once at Bruce.

"What...?" it was the incredulous questioning that sprang out of you like a jet of skepticism that poured out of your larynx.

"Well, you see," he gestured with his hands in a rather flustered way, deep in his own racing thoughts.

“The girl was generated in an external pregnancy in an artificial uterus. It's a perfect blend of magic and... well, magic and science. Something we’ve only seen before with the Asgardians. We don't know exactly the extent of the Stone's powers, but we do know that it is powerful enough to spontaneously enhance and grant sentience to beings it comes in contact with, and that HYDRA has manipulated this ability to their advantage. It's–it's amazing, really! What I'm saying is that if a proper system for it ingested and absorbed some organic fluid produced by a being affected by Stone, there would be the possibility of dominant genetics looking for viable gametes for the formation of a healthy embryo–”

“Stop,” you cut him off abruptly, finishing off too much explanation from the man older than you, “Please just–just stop fucking talking about it like it's something amazing, because it's not! It's not, Bruce!"

There was a hint of silence that wafted into the lab. Something in Banner's face instantly withered. Wanda projected a hesitant glance that spilled over your profile before turning back to the trinity of men before the two of you.

“What does that mean,” she whispered, in a strained voice, “What does that mean, exactly?”

“What does that mean, little witch,” it was Tony's turn to take matters into his own hands again, “Is that the girl is a close relative of both of you. Genetically close enough to be an offspring. So congratulations, mommies, because it's a girl! Although I think now it's a little late to make a baby shower, eh...”

“Stark, that's enough!” Steve was exasperated at the man with the goatee, in a profuse tone of reprimand to Tony's shenanigans, who held back a smirk broken at the corner of his lips, an eternal keeper of childish humor that he was.

But no words would be enough to elucidate what it was that sent your thoughts from one side to the other, in a truculent whirlwind of emotions that flowed through your veins and your nerves. And, when you came to blink another time, it was with grief sprinkled in your gaze – and you knew that Wanda could hear what you thought, because it was stronger than her, and in that moment, you were just a mess of unhinged agonies in an icy sweat that evaporated from your pores.

You blinked once at the sheer smoldering confusion, furrowing your brows in a look of vagueness.

Then, with eyes of double size, you looked towards Steve, your team leader and the most approachable of the three, who with a shake of his head, acquiesced in your doubts, what had clarified your thoughts with yourself. The walls of your stomach dropped into your abdomen, and for a second, the air that filled your bronchi was icy cold like a breath of death.

And then, like the fateful epilogue to a Homeric romance novel, you dared look your way, at Wanda, because the heat in her gaze could be felt even if you were on the other side of the room. If a pen dropped to the floor at that moment, the sound would echo throughout the lab. Wanda gulped at the saliva that froze under her tongue at your silence, and with her eyes she turned to Steve, who offered her a piercing blue look in return.

“So,” she tried, hesitantly like a wounded animal, “If… if Talia is our… our daughter,” you trembled at the word and its meaning concerning you and her, “My daughter. Does that mean I can keep her?”

“Well,” sighed the blond veteran, wrinkling his thick brows congruently, “I think that makes things a lot easier, Wanda. Even more so now that you two have obtained your American citizenship.”

“My younger cousin is a lawyer,” says Bruce in sequence to Steve’s words, “It's not exactly her field, but I believe she'll be able to help however she can. I mean... she does owe me a favor.”

He kind of tried to laugh, but the ambiance was still jittery and he gave up halfway through. Wanda nodded in a closed silence that rocked her long locks of a rich shade of shimmering brown, before once again offering you a complacent look that glowed in shades of a dull green color.

“Y/n...”

But you were an empty figure beside her, distant gaze thundering like the eyes of a lifeless puppet that has had its strings cut. Her warm right fingers, which sought comfort in the outstretched palm of your left hand, were like a reality check weighed down on your soul; the slightest brush of skin on skin sent an electric current through all your muscles, and you repelled it as if her touch were burning embers, as if touching her hurt you. But the hurt look came to the expanse of her pretty face right away.

“Y/n,” whispered Wanda in a tiny voice, so small and vulnerable, her eyes flickering in stinging remorse, her lower lip quivering in a retracted wail, “Y/n, please–just, please–”

“No–no, I don't...” you tried, but it was in vain, “Don't touch me, I... I don't... I can't, I can't...”

A single teardrop crystal streamed from your left eye to your retracted chin. She’d been inside the confines of those cells before, she knew what it was like – and her stomach did somersaults at even the thought of how they’d extracted your DNA, because that’s the same way they’d extracted hers too, between needles, tears and screams. But looking at Wanda, who needed you so much at that moment, was what made the pressure inside your stomach worse.

“I'm sorry I–I can't do this. I’m sorry but I–I can’t. I can’t.”

“Y/n, wait–!”

Wanda's clouded face, a stream of tears that accentuated the green of her eyes, was the last thing you saw before a reality vortex stripped your cells of the space that made up the lab's interior. And once you teleported to the bliss of your room, you allowed yourself to slump down onto your cold mattress, sitting with your legs bent out of bed. And then you cried. In the dark of your room, you just cried into the night.

ᗢ

As the days have passed since that revelation so bitter to swallow that not even the most expensive of the bourbons on top of Tony's shelf could ease it, you, in a state of apathetic corrosive calamity, increasingly immersed in yourself and distant from your other colleagues, only avoided the girl and Wanda as if she were a small emissary of a pandemic plague, as if living in the same environment as she would make you sick to imminent death from the disease imbued in her veins, which pulsed a blood like yours.

Your attraction soon took on tinges of an irremediable aversion spread by your system towards those who, in better terms, might have been your only accessible model of family to cherish and grace. Maybe that's what wove such a nagging veil of discomfort into your ribs when Wanda brought Talia into the hangar to greet the rest of the team after a particularly long mission, and the little girl freed herself from her mother's hand to run into Vision’s open arms, who was blissfully waiting for her embrace like a father who has just returned home.

When you walked past them, still tied in a silent line of torpor, limping on one leg and nose crooked and bloody as you were, Wanda looked at you with a glint full of meaning in her eyes. Maybe she wanted you there to welcome Talia instead of the robot-man, maybe she didn't want you too close to the girl at all.

It was like a long-running game of cat and mouse played within the limits that demarcated the longitude composed by the structures of the compound, which at one time or another would corner you in a corner with no exit; if they were in a room, together as they were always meant to be (and witnessing Wanda acting like parents in Vision's company, seeing them raise together a child that was hers and unfailingly yours as well, was just an even more unpleasant bonus for your taste), you would automatically have to be somewhere else in order to breathe properly with your ached lungs.

You then took your left hand towards the handle and opened the bathroom door, a breath of warm steam coming with you as you walked serenely towards the huge bed well placed in the middle of the room that looked like a so much too big just for your enjoyment. You've never been the type to get away with luxury, anyway; it just wasn't a construct based on your simple-minded nature.

A towel crisscrossed by the damp locks played the role of extracting, from your hair, the excess of water that tarnished the curls stuck together by the outline of your face. You wore casual pajamas, a plain dark shirt, and gym shorts that adorned the skin of your inner thighs, and nothing else to cover your modesty. You therefore placed the towel around your neck, over your broad shoulders, in the course of making your way to the phone plugged into the socket placed on the bedside table just to the right of your bed.

But you couldn't do it right away, because a familiar shiver through your senses gave you an alert mode that ran hot from the nape of your neck down the length of your spine, squeezing your ribs into your chest. And, before you could even realize what was happening there, inside the four monochromatic walls of your dull room, a space-time lapse actually broke over your bed like an indigo tear, when a child's body materialized on the sheets that covered your mattress. Talia appeared there, and you froze in your position outside the bathroom door.

“What the…?” you snorted, in defensive surprise, “What the hell do you think you're doing here, girl?”

There was a momentary excruciating silence, before you blinked once in disbelief and saw the most beautiful green eyes you had ever seen in your life – those that, by the yellow color of the lamp placed by your side of the bed, had acquired an exotic emerald color, but which contained fine traces of a unique amber next to the abysmally dark pupils.

You were rueful as you brought your right hand to your sharp face and pinched the bridge of your nose between your forefinger and thumb, a strained sigh slipping through your thin lips, blinking eyes that drooped lids in lethargy towards the child. You heard her fill and empty her lungs with air, before blinking in your direction with an announcement of tears welling up in the green of her doe eyes.

“M-mama,” was a whisper of a small voice that gradually built itself into an unsettling anxiety, “Ma...mama...mama...”

It only took a mere second for her rosebud lips to part in the foreshadowing of a cry that hissed within your eardrums.

“Hey, hey, hey, wait, calm down, don't—don't cry! Don’t Cry! You don’t need to cry!" You intervened immediately, crawling down the length of the mattress until you were sitting next to the sobbing little girl, “I'm going to take you back to your mother, all right? Damn it, I'll take you to your mother!"

You didn't hesitate to touch her thin shoulder bone over her colored shirt to teleport her along with your own body mass in search of Wanda's bedroom door. And, once there in the corridor, accompanied by the child who was still shedding more tears than she seemed to have to cry in her small body, it took a meager amount of miserable seconds that dragged lazily as in the format of hours for the enchantress to open the door with a hard jolt, her maternal senses all sharp and alert when in the presence of her little girl's weeping.

“Talia!” Wanda softened, engulfing the small body with the outline of her forearms, squeezing the teary child in a warm hug against her thin dark sweater, “It's okay, sweetie, I'm here, mama's here. It's okay, shh... it's okay, крошка.”

You couldn't readily say what it was that made you hope she would calm the girl down, who ended up slumbering in a sleep bedecked with tears and a runny nose. But Wanda came to meet you in the hallway right after she did, carefully closing the door behind her body. Even though she was still a little apparently dazed at the fact that you were still standing there, her only in cotton pajama shorts and an oversized black wool sweater, she looked so appealing when lit up by the pale light from the hallway.

“I'm sorry about that, Y/n,” she blew a weary sigh across her lips, “She… she has these powers like yours, but this is all very new to her and she's been having trouble getting it under control. Sometimes I'm afraid to wake up in the morning and find out she teleported to the Himalayas in her sleep or something.”

“It's… it's okay,” you hissed in a shrunken reply, a little awkwardly, not looking her straight in the eye, “Someday she’ll learn to deal with it. Then it gets better, trust me.”

“Well,” Wanda scanned you with a cautious glance, “Maybe if you could help her with that–”

“No, Wanda,” was your unthinking response, ever so wary in your actions, “Just… no. You know I don't wanna get involved with any of this.”

“I know, of course I know,” the brown-haired young woman gave a bashful gasp of air, failing to mask the compunction evident in her bodily actions towards your presence, “You've already made that clear, Y/n. But she is our daughter, your daughter—”

“Wanda, for Christ's sake, don't start it. Not now.”

The clamor in your tone of voice was what discouraged Wanda, who even with a good number of protests popping in her throat, couldn't say anything in the face of your so teased look at her.

Despite the emotion running through your veins, you stopped yourself from continuing to gnaw at the feeling that was distressing at your insides, an acid sensation that spread through your chest like a nuisance on your airway. And as if it were a gulf of anguish, regurgitated by your stomach, you soon tried to swallow your uncontrollable greed for your own injustice; for the violation that child meant in your life.

You then looked down at your bare feet and clicked your tongue across the roof of your mouth poorly, tucking your hands into the pockets of your sweatpants. Wanda looked into your face, which was filled with volcanic and distressing emotions, and blinked for a long time, batting her thick dark lashes.

“She… this girl, she…she’s not my daughter, Wanda. She may be yours, but she's not mine. She's just a goddamn lab experiment, that's all.”

Maybe you just wanted to hurt her. Something selfish enough rooted in your immaturity grew up for you to say it to her – only intent on hurting and ruining, because like a tantrum child, you just couldn't deal with the frustration that swelled inside you like a sickening disease. Wanda, however, didn't do more than a dry movement of her dark brows, and then profuse eyes peered in your direction—two splinters of emerald staring at you like a predator in the dark, a viper and a hare.

"Don’t say that."

The look that was turned on you, even if it was choleric, rigid or perhaps even snarky, was what you keenly yearned for in your pitied core, avoiding looking at her when the bitter remorse flitted across the face of your tongue at your own words referred toward her – because then you wouldn't have to witness Wanda's mild irises as they were, tempting you with their melancholy green, immersed in a feeling of compunction, perhaps even of disappointment or anguish. The excruciating eyes of someone who no longer had the energies contained in her body to fight to get you out of the shell you've gotten yourself into.

It annoyed you in the most acute sense of the word that this was not the first time Wanda had confronted you with her dismayed eyes. And you didn't quite know why you kept hurting her like you did. But there you were, ready to break her heart all over again.

“Don't say that,” she repeated, “She's a child, she's not to blame for any of this. She didn't ask for it—”

“And I didn’t either!”

A last spark of common sense flashed and ended in your contrite interior, lifting you up immediately, screwing the sayings of the fingers of both your hands into a pair of clenched fists with joints so pressed that, due to the lack of blood circulation, became become white and dull.

“I didn't ask for any of this, Wanda! And this girl, she–she's just a constant reminder of everything that happened to me inside that shitty lab! I look at her and all I can see is it happening to me again and again and again! Damn, I can't fucking stand being around her!”

“I went through it too, Y/n!” Wanda's tone shifted an octave, though not enough to cause a flashy scandal, “I was in that fucking lab too!”

She took an irate step toward you.

“And yet I don’t treat her like she's contagious or some shit like that! What the fuck, Y/n, you treat her like a fucking criminal! She's seven, for Christ's sake! And she is my daughter and whether you like it or not, she is yours too! So stop acting like a fucking child and for once in your life, even if it must be really hard for someone like you, be an adult and fucking act like it, dammit!”

“Oh yeah, you were in those labs too, how could I forget,” your tone dripped with acid cynicism, consolidating with your jawbone until it resembled a wire as sharp as a razor blade, “You volunteered to change the world, didn't you? Wow Wanda, such a smart move! What a fucking difference you’ve made, really!”

She, in turn, frowned, her inner woes hastily taking the form of anger at you. A thin layer of red rage carpeted the profuse moss green that grew darker in her enraged gaze.

“Turns out I never told you how I ended up in that shithole, did I? Well, the drunk asshole that I had as a father was a bastard who didn't want to feed four more mouths after my mom died, so at the first chance he got to get rid of me and my siblings, he did it without even batting an eye,” and the smile that appeared on your lips was in no way in keeping with the tears about to burst from your eyes.

“And he said I should be happy, because I was lucky I wasn't pretty enough to end up in a fucking brothel like my little sister! I was fourteen, Wanda!”

Wanda's face fell, but you just bit your lower lip, clasping the pit of your stomach in an excruciating grip – for that bad feeling which resonated in your head before the drowsiness of sleep, terrifying you through the empty darkness that comprised space stripped like a scream in the silence, just alone, like a desolate tear. It hurt you to the core of your chest as much as the shot of a projectile would hurt any other fragile human being.

You squinted your eyes and shook your head. Wanda's red anger faded into thin air, giving way to the pitying looks you so hated getting from someone. She took a gulp of air and opened her mouth to say anything, but you stopped her before she even started.

“So yeah, I'm sorry if I don't want to be in the same place as someone who reminds me of this shitty time. Whose miserable existence is nothing but a reminder of all they took away from me, of how much they violated me over and over again, of how much they stole from my entire life!”

You sobbed, because you the notion of what was happening there fell like a bucket of ice water down the length of your back. You were losing her, and she was losing you too.

“Y/n,” she mussed, gracelessly, as if you really were such a small child as Talia, “Y/n, I'm so sorry, I–I didn't know–I didn't know that–”

“Don't talk to me anymore,” you breathed, your vision blurred and clouded, “Don't ever fucking talk to me again, Wanda.”

Wanda didn't try to stop you when you left in a heartbeat. Just like you didn't try to stop her tears, and she didn't try to make you stay.

ᗢ

“Am I a bad daughter?”

"What...?"

Five more autumns had been later than the one you find yourself in. Wanda has been living in New Jersey with Vision and Talia for a few years now, being an ever so helpful mother to her little daughter, the best that has ever happened to her and the worst that has ever happened to you.

But the girl born to you is still there, perched on a sofa opposite the one you're cuddling in at your own home, and with the aging enhancements to the facial features, you can't help but notice how much she is very reminiscent of Wanda in her sharp cheekbones and the shape of her eyebrows – even if, in a way, also to yourself when you were the same age (twelve years old or something). Like the seasonal change of seasons, the freckles are fading from her nose. Someday, you just know that she could be mistaken for her young mother if seen from afar.

“Am I a bad daughter?” asks Talia awkwardly after long doses of stillness, immediately following a generous sip of water from the glass curled between her fingers.

You considered offering her a sip of freshly brewed still warm coffee, but when you realized she was just a child, you decided that water was good, water was neutral ground and a safe option. And you're probably paying attention to her drinking water so you don't have to think of a worthy answer to her inferred questioning of you.

"You... you...” there’s a pause, “You don't...I don't..."

Your sentence dries up and dies for a split second, though, as you stop yourself before you say too much to the girl, who frowns at you in a custom all too familiar to your cognition – as Wanda used to do when younger. You don't want to burden her, still as young as she is, with answers and satisfactions for someone who wasn't there for her.

“Why do you think that, Talia?” the girl sways a bit at her own actions before your gaze, dragging her upper teeth over the cheek of her rosy lower lip, and for a second there's a sliver of silence that seems to break through your ear canal.

“Because you never spoke to me.”

The answer shuts you down like a deferred open fist punch to the middle of your face, though you still stare at her with both irises going on at the insipid little face so vacillating in your presence. You open your mouth, nothing comes out, and then you close it again as best you can. Then, you opened it again, but soon whatever it was that would emerge from there is canceled out. Finally, you choose to console yourself with the gaze that descends to the laminate flooring placed between your bare feet, even though you have within yourself the fullest notion that, what you need and what you so lack in your system, right after such a shock, it's a good dose of something much stronger than a simple set of coffee beans and hot water.

“Talia, I...” you hesitate for a while, “How did you...?”

“Vis told me,” says the girl, “I... I asked him if he was my father because he is married to ma, but he said he can't be my father because he's not human like me and her. And that I don't have a father because I'm made from ma and... and you, Miss Y/l/n. But I didn't understand what he meant. I think it has to do with those lab days.”

You press your lips together in a single long line, digging into statements which you do not see yourself as fully capable of expounding on the girl you only recognize, then, as your daughter (because, facts being facts, it is what she is). Maybe Vision is just a clueless douche, but you always knew that eventually she would catch on. You just didn't want to be the one to break the news to her.

At least, not without such resolutions inferring a handful of new themes and questions which you might not even be able to clarify for such a chaste child, still sprucing up to the height of her tender twelve years of life; you don’t intend to cultivate it with more seeds of doubt that, perhaps, may come to bear fruit in the form of large trees of insecurity in her future. You aim, then, as a priority, to preserve from the naivety that little Talia has before her two mother figures, who were, respectively, you and Wanda. Two extremes very different from each other.

You look at her, and for a second, the pulsing muscle in your chest aches. No longer out of remorse, or even repulsion. It only hurts because, after the years have passed and your maturity has dawned, you only see something of your own in Talia's face. In front of her you stand up, and the green gaze follows you as you come towards her as if you have something to say.

With your fingertips, however, you touch her thin chin, seeking the gaze to link with yours once more. So you give her a tender smile, showered with regretful caresses, and with your thumb you caressed her smooth-skinned jawbone. Once again, your gaze realizes that Talia has the traits of a bone structure similar to the one that Wanda also has.

“I'm sorry, kid,” you sigh at the girl, before taking the small body in your arms, leaning your cheek against the crown of the dark haired head. There, Talia snuggled in and expelled a sigh, because, for the both of you it just feels good. It feels right.

“I'm so sorry, Talia.”

When a new knock was referred to the wood of your door, the young girl had already slept lying on your sofa. For half a second you just watched over the child beside you as you never had before, her chest heaving and falling over her red jacket, while Talia snored to the blandishments of a slumber. You had long ago retained her facial features in memory (the sharp eyebrows and nose, the pearly lips), but it was inevitable to look at her once more.

You covered her small body with a thick blanket before going to tend to your new visitor.

“Y/n, is she…?” is the first thing you are told by Wanda's anguished tone, who casts glances behind your shoulder in search of her daughter inside your house.

“She slept on the couch, don't worry,” you nod, which elicits a relieved sigh from the other woman, “You… would you like some tea?”

Wanda blinks in your direction.

"Yes, please..." she whispers, "I would like to."

Wanda is still the same woman you fell in love with at some remote moment in your past memories, to whom you had committed your heart and soul – the same emerald eyes rimmed with an eerie glow, the same athletic, supple back, the same dark hair that hugs the outline of the prudent face. But she seems more centered. Like you, she's more mature, weathered by time.

She just looks so pretty sipping from a cup of tea inside your own kitchen.

During the succinct moment in which your gazes gather in a single line, one applying themselves to unveil the other, the gap in your chest is able to sip and scrutinize every measly detail of her radiant beauty, so that you can then contrast it with the countenance of the young woman you left behind so long ago, checking that your disillusioned eyes aren't mocking your feelings. However, with no room for error, she is still Wanda. Your Wanda.

“She knows,” you say then, with your forearms crossed in front of your chest, your hips snug against the icy marble counter of the sink, “About me, I mean. She knows. She says Vision told her.”

“I know,” Wanda sighs behind swirls of steam rising from the inside of the cup that she shields with a wall of her own fingers, now devoid of any rings to be seen – including the wedding ring that has always captured your suffering gaze, “That's why she ran away. Vis, he's just... he's complicated. I know I can't exactly demand some things from him because he's not human, but... lately he's just been so... so...”

“Robotic?” you try, with a teasing half smile, and Wanda allows herself to laugh grimly, shaking her head of long dark hair that now looks a little shorter than it once did.

“Yeah,” she sighs, “Robotic.”

And she looks tired, as she takes gulps of oxygen to say, “We're getting divorced. Or breaking up, I don't know, we were never really married. It’s not like he has a birth certificate.”

The woman wails in a wretched wail, and so much of the past you can see in her, so helpless and vulnerable, that your very heartstrings tighten in a grim girdling, bathed in a greedy despondency.

“This sucks, Wanda,” you say, frowning complacently, “I… I'm sorry about it.”

“It's okay, Y/n,” she whispers, “It's just… lately I can't seem to do anything right. My life is in chaos, and I'm losing control of everything and I'm just so, so tired..."

You then approach her in silent strides, crossing the kitchen to stand next to her right shoulder, who is leaning against the dark marble of the island. And she doesn't seem to repel you at all; on the contrary, she comes even closer to you, to the point that your elbows almost rub under the clothes you wear – she in an open cashmere cardigan that exudes cozy airs of domestic comfort, so different from the clothes with those dark colors from before, and you in an old red hoodie that once belonged to her.

“And then, Vision went over there and told Talia about you,” her grip presses against the pale porcelain of the cup, “And now I'm sure she hates me for keeping it from her for so long. I was just trying to protect her, and now I'm… I'm just a bad mom, I guess.”

“Hey, hey, hey,” you cry out immediately, searching for her lowered gaze, “No, don't say that, Wanda, that's not true and you know it's not. Damn, you are an amazing mother to that girl, from day one you always were! And it's noticeable how much you love her and how much she loves you too. You've always tried so hard, you've always given so much of yourself… seriously, Wanda, you're amazing!”

And she blinks, her lashes thick and dark, a pre-announcement of tears that are swept away from the emerald green of her eyes.

"Do you... really think so?"

“I always did,” you shrug, “Even though I've been an asshole to you and her, I've always… I've always paid attention to the two of you. Like, not in a creepy way, I'm not a pervert or whatever, it's just—”

“Y/n,” she kind of smiles at you, “It’s okay, I get it. The three of us are connected by the Mind Stone, it's normal for you to feel something different about us. Vis said that the attraction he felt for me was because of that.”

“No, Wanda, that's not what I–” you exhaust yourself on a sigh, squinting your eyes for a few miserable seconds. You lift your eyelids and finally gives Wanda a supple, complacent look, no longer in a battle against your feelings for her, “It wasn't just the Stone, Wanda. It was never just the Stone. I was immature and stupid and for a while I wished it was, but it was never just that and I was always sure of it. I would really fall in love with you in any possible situation, Wanda, whether with the Stone or not.”

"In any situation...?" and she looks so fragile, when she casts a light green gaze upon you like the leaves of spring trees. And you shake your head in unsyllabic agreement with her doubts.

“In any situation,” is an unerring tone of voice, one she's never seen sketched out by you when it comes to your feelings for her.

“Either way, I would always fall in love with you. From the way you smile and scrunch your nose, or the way you eat cereal holding your spoon in that weird way, the smell of your perfume, the laugh you get when you watch your favorite sitcoms, for... for the way you took Talia in when we found her. It's not just the damn Stone, Wanda, I just can't help but fall in love with you just the way you are.”

Your gaze is sharpened by a still-young memory that echoes through the temples of your beloved Wanda – who pours out her appreciation for your figure before her in the tenderness exhaled through her pores.

You see it as a reminder of your past, where you both belonged in each other's arms and made love in the breath of the night, kissed by the moonlight, with no one knowing what you were doing away from the sight of astute spectators. However, your heart rises high in your chest as soon as the idea that she is in front of you is evident again, and it is different, but it is also so much the same as before. You smile at Wanda, who was once your victory and your defeat, much more than just a piece of the Mind Stone that lives in you. The one who always had your heart in her hands to keep.

“In any universe, Wanda, I will always love you.”

She gasps as she brings her face towards you, which doesn't flinch at all from the other woman's action. Lips touching as if to keep an ancient secret from each other, Wanda melting against you.

And a cunning pink tongue slips into her peach-colored mouth like a cunning snake, and there, with the velvet touch, you stroke your tongue against hers expertly and needy, coiling around her with a mature agility, as if guiding a wet dance between two people who, behind the excitement that seemed to warm their bodies like a summer mist, only sought to connect through cracked kisses – the echoes of the words you both wanted to say, but you were never sure how you were going to do it.

She still tastes like red, which is good to keep in your mouth, but the other taste you find in her is new and causes a smoldering happiness inside your chest – because it's the taste of the reciprocation of a feeling so intrinsic in your bloodstream, and in hers also. She kisses you because she misses you. You kiss her because you want to feel her again. And together, you kiss just because you love each other.

“Don't go away again,” her hot breath brushes the cheek of your half-swollen upper lip, her fingers carefully caressing the corners of your face between her hands, “Please, Y/n, never go away again. Never leave me again.”

“I won't, Wanda,” you muss, looking into her eyes, as close to you in her embrace as you are, “I'll be here for Talia and for you, I promise. I’ll never make you cry again. This time I’ll be the person you deserve to have by your side.”

When she smiles, so beautiful and so peaceful, you kiss the grin on her mouth. Again and again.

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