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aparticularbandit · 11 months

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The Trap

Summary: “Do I look like I’m being tortured, super star?” Agatha gestures to the expanse around them, and as she does, different things pop up to fill it: a table covered with food, multiple bookshelves filled to the brim with books, an intricately carved four poster bed that looks feather soft. “You put me in a dream. I’m just lonely. You, on the other hand.” She smirks, and her eyes light with mischief. “You’re in pain, being actually tortured by a woman who is paying you just so much attention, and unable to really do anything about it.” She scrunches her nose. “Who’s in the better position here?”

Wandagatha Week 2023 Prompt 2: Body Swap

Wanda Maximoff/Agatha Harkness Rating: T.

AO3

previous chapter / next chapter

Unfortunately for Wanda, the curse – whatever it is, if there even is one to begin with – is not so easy to break. Maybe it’s simply that it isn’t easy for her to heal at all; even that little burst of magic that had previously come so easily to her sapped her of her strength for days, leaving her unable to speak even if she’d wanted. She catches it, though, the very clear disappointment in Agnes’s eyes when she doesn’t say anything the next day, when she’s barely able to chew the bits of ice she brings to her.

That’s it, then. If she wants to get better, then she has to focus on that, not get distracted enough to reach into Agnes’s all too empty head and expend her very valuable energy trying to get information from an evil witch who only wants to use it as a bartering system. Which also means she can’t poke back in and visit Agatha like she’d said she would. The idea of the older witch sitting in that little space with her arms crossed, lips contorted into a scowl (or a pout, if Wanda wants to make herself hurt by laughing), tapping one foot on that spot’s equivalent of the ground, growing steadily more annoyed when she doesn’t appear amuses her. Not enough to give her the strength to eat more than ice chips for a few days, but enough.

For now.

Agnes continues to dote on her. She rarely if ever talks about anything going on in Westview, although she mentions once with a halting laugh that it would be horrible if any of her other friends realized that Wanda was there. It’s the first – and only – time she mentions other friends, and it leaves Wanda wondering if the laugh was about someone finding out she was there or about the idea that Agnes has other friends. She could reach into her mind to find out; she doesn’t want to waste that strength.

Once, when Wanda gains the gumption to speak again, she meets Agnes’s eyes and asks, voice still rasping with disuse, “Why are you here?”

Agnes stops mid-sentence, stutters over her words, and lets her gaze drop, just the same as it had when she first sat on the edge of Wanda’s mattress. Her thumb rubs over the rag she’d been using to mop Wanda’s forehead, worrying the wet, soft fabric with the tip of her nail. “I…I don’t know what you mean, dear.”

Wanda’s lips brush together, not as parched as they were when she first woke here, but still cracked. She considers her words carefully before trying again. “With me,” she clarifies, hesitating before continuing, “without your…your friends.”

“Oh.” Agnes flushes a bright red, still averting her eyes. “You need me, hon. They….” One corner of her lips lifts in a feigned smile. “They’re fine without me. And you know, they’re used to me not being around.” Her gaze finally lifts, meeting Wanda’s, with that same somber sort of sad smile. She gives a little shrug. “You’re better company.”

Wanda doesn’t believe that in the slightest. She’s just a body in a bed that occasionally talks; the only difference between her and a body pillow is that Agnes needs to feed and water her; she might as well just be a body-sized plant at this rate. She licks her cracked lips and lies, “I’ll be fine, Agnes.”

Agnes searches her eyes, and the light in her own fades. “They say that, too.” She gently places her hand over Wanda’s, careful not to clench her fingers or pat at all, trying her best to avoid causing her pain, and then goes back to what she was doing. “You’re talking, so,” she hesitates, “does that mean you’re ready to try food again? Maybe some pudding? Jello?”

Wanda is sick and tired of Jello, but she nods anyway.

It isn’t until Wanda is able to sit up in bed on her own on a regular basis, until she can eat more than smooth textured food like mashed potatoes, pudding, and the many, many flavors of Jello that she dares reach out to Agatha again. (In the interim, Agnes learns three things: 1) Wanda likes dark gravy with her mashed potatoes; 2) Wanda likes french vanilla pudding best; and 3) Wanda will only eat lime, watermelon, and strawberry Jello – and she’ll only eat the strawberry on a good day, otherwise it makes her already dry lips pucker in a way that, oddly, the lime does not.)

Wanda hasn’t been testing the rest of her magic, finds that on the odd occasion when she stretches out towards it that unbidden it has started stitching her body back together again, much to her initial regret. Now, she only wants it to stitch her together faster so that she can get out of here sooner.

Still, when Agnes finds her sitting up, her face lights up. She brings a tray with two bowls of soup – something still easy to eat, so that Wanda doesn’t choke, and a second bowl for herself, so that they can eat together – and sets it on Wanda’s lap as she settles on the mattress next to her. “Feeling better today, hon? Or are you just happy to see me?”

Agnes’s attempts to flirt still make Wanda uncomfortable, even as, on occasion, they bring a warm flush to her cheeks. “Better,” she croaks out, and she places a hand carefully over Agnes’s. “Hold, please.”

She doesn’t know why she says please. Maybe it’s just the habit of what she’s heard from sitcoms over the years, of characters stuck doing jobs in call centers and having to move one caller from them to someone else. It certainly can’t be that—

Agnes freezes, just as before, and Wanda keeps her hand over Agnes’s as she mentally reaches out and within her.

It’s easier to find the spot in Agnes’s mind where Agatha resides now that she’s been there before, and Wanda floats toward her without near the insistence that she did before, hoping that doing so in this matter might preserve some of her energy and not drain her quite so nearly as it had before. As before, she finds Agatha waiting for her, wild hair pulled back into a mussy half-bun, sitting in a high-backed chair padded with violet velvet, a cup of tea in one hand. Agatha glances up lazily toward her and then returns to her cup of tea and…is that a book?

Wanda’s teeth grit together, her jaw clenching. “How are you conjuring all of this? You shouldn’t have any magic, let alone enough to do—” She gestures to the trapped witch, to the fireplace with a still roaring fire behind her. “How?”

Agatha gives another infuriating shrug. “Not sure, doll.” Then she holds up one finger. “Now, if you’ll give me a minute, I just want to finish this chapter—” She waits for what feels like a ridiculously long time to finish the page, turns it, gives it a quick skim and a nod, and then closes it on her other finger before conjuring it away entirely. Then her lips curve into a near wolfish grin. “You came back. Honestly, hon, I didn’t believe you would.”

Wanda wants to say something about keeping her promises, but she hadn’t promised anything. In point of fact, she had fully intended to never come back, but…. “I needed someone with a little more bite than your,” she struggles to think of a word to describe Agnes, and failing to think of one supplies, “other. person.” She conjures a chair of her own and nearly collapses into it, rubbing her forehead. “I can only take so much of her.”

“That’s the point, hon. Wundagore wants you to suffer—”

“I don’t care,” Wanda groans out. “We had a taste test of Jello. Every kind of Jello and every kind of Jello pudding so she could guess at what I liked. Do you know how horrible some of that is?”

Agatha snorts. “I can guess.” That wolfish grin never disappears. “At least she isn’t making it from scratch. Then your suffering would never end.” She gives Wanda a wink.

Wanda is suddenly glad that Agnes doesn’t have near the knowledge that Agatha does. She was glad before, of course, but she’d thought that where she hadn’t given the woman specific commands, she would draw on Agatha’s mind to fill in the rest. At least this isn’t something that made it through. She sighs again. “You’re supposed to be suffering,” she whines, frustrated. “Why aren’t you suffering?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Agatha glances around the black, blank expanse around them, broken only by the flickering shadows cast by the fire. “It’s very calm in here. You could do with this sort of vacation, hon. Get your mind screwed on straight.”

Now Wanda snorts. She covers her lips with one hand, gives a little bemused shake of her head, and then glances up with sparkling eyes. “You want me to stay in your torture cell.”

“Do I look like I’m being tortured, super star?” Agatha gestures to the expanse around them, and as she does, different things pop up to fill it: a table covered with food, multiple bookshelves filled to the brim with books, an intricately carved four poster bed that looks feather soft. “You put me in a dream. I’m just lonely. You, on the other hand.” She smirks, and her eyes light with mischief. “You’re in pain, being actually tortured by a woman who is paying you just so much attention, and unable to really do anything about it.” She scrunches her nose. “Who’s in the better position here?”

Wanda doesn’t want to consider it. She doesn’t trust Agatha to be telling the truth. She has to be lying. Has to be. Agatha never tells her the truth about anything. At least…not the whole truth.

And yet she came here the first time to ask her for information.

She’s not going to think about that.

“Sounds like I need to make a better torture cell.” Wanda glances up, meets Agatha’s eyes, and refuses to give her the smile she knows the other woman wants. A smile means she’s making a joke. She isn’t making a joke. She’s taking notes.

Agatha holds her gaze, lets it flick away only once, and then brings it back. Her eyes move so quickly that Wanda doesn’t know what she’s looking at and honestly finds that she doesn’t care. Then Agatha rests her head gently on her head, a smug smirk lifting one corner of her lips. “Sounds like you made a perfect one for you, hon.”

Wanda tries not to think about what Agatha said.

She tries. Really really hard.

But most of her days are spent either alone or listening to Agnes’s chatter – and there’s only so many times she can listen to Agnes talk about the same things without tuning out. Every now and again, Agnes tries to draw her into conversation, but more often than not, Wanda feels too exhausted to talk – both from how much effort it is taking to heal and from how much she does pay attention to what Agnes is saying before having to stop.

And the thing about empty days and needing a distraction is that her mind returns to what Agatha said. Returns to the idea of her perfect torture cell. And returns to the thought that wherever she has locked Agatha is not nearly as horrific as she was led to believe it would be.

Agatha’s lonely, sure, but maybe, if she had to deal with Agnes’s chatter from the outside, if she was stuck in bed waiting to heal the way that Wanda is now, that would be a bigger torture for her than the empty blank corner of her own mind where she could conjure whatever she wants. She certainly wouldn’t be able to conjure anything out here.

And maybe, if Wanda plays this right, she’ll get that nice, empty corner of space to sit and think and do whatever she wants while Agatha is stuck out here being forced to—

Wanda tries not to think about what Agatha said.

She tries.

But it keeps coming back, and she can’t keep herself from thinking about it, and the more she thinks about it, the more one corner of her lips creeps up into a smug smile.

It takes more time. More time and more of ignoring Agnes and more food and more sipping at the straw that she places at Wanda’s lips and more conserving enough energy that she can cast another spell, and it takes significantly more time than the last time, takes significantly more time because the amount of magic she will need to cast this spell is significantly more than just pausing Agnes and reaching into her mind and digging in deeper, which is something Wanda’s been able to do since the inception of her abilities, it’s nothing, but this—

This is more.

But eventually, eventually, Wanda has it. Enough magic. She’s sure of it. She can cast this spell, and she’ll be able to sit safe and sound until she’s better, and Agatha will be stuck feeling the weight of her words. Are there risks involved? Sure there are. But Wanda isn’t thinking about the risks. She has thought about them, but the day in and day out of being somewhere she hates gets to her, and then the risks don’t look as risky. As bad.

And the potential benefits? Well. Sometimes the potential benefits are all that Wanda can see.

So one evening, when Agnes is tucking her into bed, fluffing her pillows, and remarking about how proud she is of how far Wanda has come, Wanda reaches out, loops her right thumb and finger around Agnes’s left wrist, and casts. A thin scarlet cord ties their pinkies together – loose at first before cinching so tight that Wanda feels like her pinky is going to snap off entirely.

Then everything goes blank.

Wanda tries to blink.

She can’t blink.

Wanda tries to move.

She can’t move.

Wanda tries to breathe.

She can’t breathe.

The screaming tucked away in that corner of her mind engulfs the entirety of her as she looks down at her own body out of Agatha’s – Agnes’s – Agatha’s eyes, but she can’t scream.

As she – as Agnes looks – Wanda’s body glows with a bright scarlet light. Then her lips curl into a smug smirk that looks wrong on her face because it isn’t her look, it isn’t her at all, it’s—

“Oh, hon,” Agatha says in her voice, “you really shouldn’t have.” She slowly sits up in bed – how she is able to move so easily when it still caused Wanda varying levels of pain to do exactly what Agatha is now doing – because Agatha doesn’t just sit up, she stands, slowly brushes one hand along her arm, and then snaps her fingers, shifts her clothes with another shimmer of scarlet, and then lets out a soft, relaxed sigh. “You really are easy, buttercup.” She taps Agnes’s nose once.

It’s supposed to send me back now, Wanda thinks but cannot say, glaring at Agatha with all her strength, knowing that Agnes is making no such expression. It’s supposed to put me back when I’ve healed. Why isn’t it putting me back?

Agatha gently cups Agnes’s face, brushes a thumb along her own sharp cheekbone, and meets her own eyes. “I’ve got your power now, doll, and you’re just….” She chuckles. “You’re just a doll.” Then she presses a gentle kiss to Agnes’s forehead. “Don’t get my body into trouble while I’m away, dear.”

Away?

“Oh, what’s the old saying?” Agatha stops at the bedroom door and glances over Wanda’s shoulder easily enough. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” She gives her a wink. “Be a good girl, Agnes.”

As soon as Agatha says her name in Wanda’s tone of voice, Agnes jumpstarts. “Wanda?” But by the time she tries to focus on that impersonator, Agatha is gone, teleporting away with a cloud of scarlet smoke.

Wanda screams after her. Wanda tries to beat along the inside of the corner of Agnes’s mind where she’s been trapped. Wanda wants to conjure her own magic and make everything right.

Agnes ignores all of this and instead sets about cleaning up the room that had been Wanda’s so-called cell.

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our-blood-is-our-ink · 11 months

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—✧Day Three: Accidental Kiss✧—

When Wanda takes a running leap and topples both herself and Agatha off the building in middle of their fight she never thought it would make them wind up here

Here being passionately and angrily making out with the older witch

The first kiss was completely accidental

She had landed on top of Agatha, and their lips had just collided

Wanda isn't certain which one of them turned it into something purposeful

There's a taste of metallic blood, and Wanda thinks she must have split Agatha's lip open with how hard she has bitten down

The other woman growls into Wanda's mouth and flips them over, so that Wanda's on the bottom

Wanda gasps as Agatha's tongue enters her mouth and practically fucks it with the appendage

She's not going to just let it happen though

Wanda tries to fight Agatha

Tries being the operative word

Wanda is sorely inexperienced, and it's clear Agatha is anything but

Eventually, Agatha pulls away, after what seems like hours

Wanda's left panting, breathless

And feeling slightly brainless too

"Bet your toaster oven never kissed you like that, huh, superstar?"

Agatha's so fucking smug

Of course Wanda is going to pull her back down in order to kiss her stupid

It's only fair, after all

Turnabout is fair play, as they say

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our-blood-is-our-ink · 11 months

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—✧Day Two: Body Swap✧—

It's the Hex that went wrong

That's how this happened

One moment Agatha is fighting Wanda, fighting the Scarlet Witch

The next she's waking up in bed next to a toaster oven with an overpowered stone lodged in his forehead

It's a fascinating thing, to wake up and not be in agonizing pain from her back

Of course, her joints had never hurt her quite like Wanda's body does

She's embarrassed by the whimper of pain that escapes, and wonders how Wanda had dealt with such bone deep aching without the use of magic

She'd still trade in a heartbeat -- joint pain over the centuries old scars she was gifted to by her mother

Wanda, for her part, wakes up, and nearly screams when she moves too fast

How in the world was Agatha so nimble and agile when every movement pulled at the skin of her back?

She then realizes that if she's in Agatha's body, Agatha must be in hers

Vision -- her boys -- are trapped in the house with her and they don't even know it

Of course she goes running

Or, she tries to

Seriously how does Agatha manage with her back all fucked up like this?

She eventually makes her way to the house

Only to discover Agatha is... Wow she's a great actress

It seems as if no one remembers the fight that had just been taking place

(Where is S.W.O.R.D. for that matter?)

Wanda just walks right in

Only then does Agatha show her panic

But when Wanda goes to zap Agatha...

"Can't do any magic either, huh, toots?"

Vision refuses to sleep in the same room as either of them

He takes the couch... Meaning Agatha and Wanda are sharing a room

What could go wrong???

When Wanda refuses to share the bed, Agatha rolls her eyes

"What do you want me to do, walk your body over to Ralph's and sleep there?"

Wanda won't let Agatha out of sight with her body -- she doesn't trust her with it

After about a week of tension between everyone in the Maximoff household, time loops for everyone but them

The cycle keeps repeating itself as Wanda and Agatha grow more comfortable in one another's bodies

Finally, sometime around during the fourth month of this bullshit, Wanda finds herself kissing Agatha, straddling the other witch and trapping her beneath her

It's a very odd sensation for them both, because their minds are turned on by one thing, but the bodies they inhabit another

Agatha flips them over, but is careful of her Wanda's back.

"Wow, buttercup, I hadn't realized I was so beautiful."

Wanda is shocked at Agatha's audacity, and Agatha can't help but laugh at her expression

"I also hadn't realized my face could look like that."

"Will you stop that, you're making this weird!" Wanda whines

Agatha kisses her to shut her up

It only escalates from there

The next morning they scramble to hide hickies and bruises without magic

Their relationship continues to deepen over the course of several months

Wanda quietly breaks up with Vision -- she loves him, but the Hex... It has to come down, and he'll go with it

She ignores the fact that Billy and Tommy will go with it as well, ignores how much it causes her heart to rip into two. She doesn't know if she believes Agatha when the other witch promises to help her find a way to bring them back.

Until one night, after Agatha had helped Wanda and Vision tuck the boys in for bed, she slips her arms around Agatha, and whispers I love you

And Agatha, in an extremely rare moment of vulnerability says I love you too, superstar

The world spins the moment the words leave Agatha's mouth

She finds herself back in her own body, collapsed on the grassy area in the town center

When she manages to sit up, she sees Wanda much in the same situation

Vision is anxiously hovering about Wanda, as are the boys

"Angel..?"

Wanda warily makes eye contact, and sees...

Agatha isn't sure what she sees on her face, in her eyes, but whatever it is, it's enough.

Wanda gently brushes her boys away, and makes her way to Agatha

"Did you mean it?"

"That I'll help you find them again? Or that I love you?"

The Scarlet Witch reaches down with her own hands, her body in her control once more, and helps Agatha up to her feet

"Promise?"

"I swear it, Red."

Wanda knows what it's like to live in Agatha's body, as intimately as Agatha knows what it's like to live in Wanda's

It creates a special sort of bond they now share

They take care of the military easily enough, working together

Agatha gives Wanda her privacy when they reach the Maximoff house

At the end of it all, Wanda is no longer standing alone in the middle of the empty lot

A cool hand slips into her own

"Magic can do many things. We'll get your boys back."

Wanda only squeezes her hand in response, but it's enough.

They're enough, together

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aparticularbandit · 10 months

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The Talk

Summary: “Do you have any grandchildren?” Wanda asks, curled up in bed, staring at the wall, unable to fall asleep. Maybe she’s curious, maybe she just wants to hit at Agatha for hitting at her earlier, maybe it’s both and something else that she cannot name.

Either way, she can’t see the way Agatha’s expression screws over her own face when she says, blunt, “No.”

For Wandagatha Week Prompt 6: Magical Pregnancy/Adoption/Creator's Choice.

Wanda Maximoff/Agatha Harkness Rating: T.

AO3

previous chapter

The problem, Wanda quickly discovers, of wearing someone else’s body as your own is this—

Well, truth be told, there are a lot of problems. One of them is that she doesn’t want this body and can’t figure out how to change it back. Another is that she still can’t quite figure out how to get Agatha’s magic to work, despite the fact that she remembers a few runes here and there from her time studying the Darkhold. (And it’s not as though Agatha is helping her with any of this; it’s not as though the other woman has given her any books or new runes or anything at all. Wanda isn’t surprised that Wundagore cursed her, but she doesn’t understand why it cursed Agatha, too. Maybe the curse is to her body, to whomever has the powers of the Scarlet Witch. Maybe, if she wanted, she could leave. (But would that really matter, if Agatha was compelled to find her again?))

The problem, Wanda quickly discovers, of wearing someone else’s body as your own is this:

How do you bathe?

It was different when Agnes was still in control. Wanda had been forced to look and had pretended she hadn’t seen anything at all; she hadn’t had a choice, and she hadn’t had to think about what she was doing. Agatha can make Wanda’s body look however she wants, so Wanda can pretend that she’s made it look like herself whenever she needs to bathe. Or used magic instead of standing in a shower or soaking in a nice hot bath. One of those two options and not any of the other ones, which she doesn’t want to think about. No. There aren’t any other options.

(Except that there is another option and Wanda has to think about it because she’s gone so long without bathing that she is, in fact, starting to stink. And unlike some people, she doesn’t have the ability to shift her form into her own.)

It’s barely a week later, near to noon, when Agatha walks out, scrunches up her nose, and says, “Tell me this isn’t how you’ve been keeping yourself, hon. Studying the Darkhold can be a bore, but it doesn’t keep you from—”

Wanda presses her lips together in a thin line, bites her lower lip, and then interrupts her. “Agatha. I can’t—”

“Sure, you can, toots. It isn’t like you haven’t seen everything already.” Agatha settles onto one of the kitchen stools with another apple – sometimes, it feels like that’s all the other witch eats, even though Wanda knows better; she’s seen Agatha eat more than that (like the peach…but Wanda doesn’t like to think about the peach) – and takes a bite. Flecks of apple splatter about her lips. It’s easier not to look; if anything, seeing herself like that makes Wanda nauseous.

Wanda doesn’t want to ask.

(She has to ask.)

((She’s not going to ask.))

Instead, Wanda squirms, presses her lips together again, and gives a little shake of her head. “No, no, I don’t want to—”

“Wanda. Hon.” Agatha sets her apple on the counter, crosses the distance between them, and tucks a finger under her chin, tilting her head back until their eyes can meet. “If I don’t care, then you shouldn’t care. Got it, love?”

Wanda grits her teeth together and avoids Agatha’s gaze, instead letting her eyes shift to linger on the counter behind her, on the apple with one bite missing. “I care. Don’t you have any concern for decency?”

Agatha laughs, and she drops her finger from Wanda’s chin. “Me? Decent? Whatever gave you that idea?” She turns and sashays away from Wanda, hips moving back and forth in a way that might have been distracting if Wanda weren’t really looking at herself doing it. Now it just makes her sick. Agatha seats herself back on her stool, takes another bite of her apple, and says with her mouth full, “Now go get clean, dear, or I will do it for you.”

“Do it for me?” Wanda echoes, one brow raising. “What do you mean?”

With a sigh, Agatha snaps her fingers, and Wanda disappears.

All of a sudden, Wanda finds herself in a shower, clothes completely gone, the water on freezing cold. She hisses through her teeth, shivering in the freeze, and reaches forward without a second thought, twisting the taps to make it hotter. The water burns at first, and she focuses on getting it to a good, comfortable temperature. That’s more useful than yelling at Agatha, especially since she expects that’s what Agatha wants. She can’t do that; she doesn’t want to give her the satisfaction.

But now that the water’s warm, now that she’s warming up, Wanda has to grapple with exactly what’s going on. She shuts her eyes tight, so tight she almost sees stars instead of inky darkness. Her arms wrap protectively around herself, but that doesn’t help. She still feels….

Feels her.

Wanda grits her teeth even tighter together. She hates this, hates the situation she’s put herself in with what Agatha called a broken spell, hates that Agatha won’t just reverse it. But of course, Agatha wouldn’t reverse it. Put them back in the positions they’d been in, and what would Wanda do? Lock her back within Agnes. It wouldn’t even be a second thought.

(Would it? She’s lived through Agnes now, and Agatha freed her. Would she really force Agatha to go through something that Agatha, when their positions were reversed, didn’t force her to live through? (She had, briefly, but only briefly. She’d let her go. (She refuses to consider that Agatha might have done something nice for her. Agatha has to have some sort of ulterior motive. She just doesn’t know what it is.)))

For a long time, Wanda just stands there, her eyes shut tight, arms no longer wrapped around herself, hands clenched into fists at her sides, held far enough away from her that she isn’t touching anything, except for the shower wall, except for the shower curtain. She isn’t touching her.

Then she takes a deep breath in. Lets it out. And slowly opens her eyes.

“Agatha,” Wanda asks later that evening, when she feels the weight of the other witch pressed on the other side of the mattress, and then hesitates, unable to get the words out.

In the silence, Agatha responds. “Yes, dear?”

Wanda thinks her voice sounds softer than normal, but she can’t be sure. She tugs the comforter a little tighter about herself. “Never mind.”

Truth be told, Wanda hates that Agatha still curls up in bed with her. She can’t stop her, but she’s made it very clear she doesn’t like it. It’s not like Agnes doesn’t have a guest room; it’s just that Agatha refuses to use it. The one time that Wanda decides to take the guest room for herself, Agatha finds her anyway, perhaps a few minutes later than normal, and curls up just as she always does, with her back pressed against Wanda’s. The guest room is even worse for this; the bed is smaller, so Wanda can’t just move to the edge of the bed and hope to touch Agatha as little possible that way.

Agatha never presses her cold feet up against Wanda, but Wanda frequently presses hers against Agatha. It’s not that she wants the other witch to warm them up (although Agatha had suggested that in the most suggestive way possible); it’s that she wants to make the other witch uncomfortable and annoyed the same way she’d always been annoyed with Pietro when they’d been curled up in the exact same position, when they’d been in the orphanage, when they’d left the orphanage and lived on the streets of Sokovia.

But Agatha never gets annoyed with her, or if she does, she never shows it. If anything, she’s entertained by her. Smug smiles. Smirks. Smooth suggestive snark.

Wanda hates that, too, hates hearing all of that in her own voice, coming from her own lips.

And as much as she hates them, as much as she hates looking at Agatha’s body instead of her own, showers become a bit of a respite. Wanda can be alone there. And when she’s alone, she can think over the many, many questions she has for Agatha Harkness…and whether she will ever ask them at all.

“Hon,” Agatha eventually says, unprompted, “why don’t you let me show you a thing or two? Not blasting, but a few basic spells.” She rakes a hand gentle through her – Wanda’s – auburn hair, leans her head into her hand, and gazes down at her free finger as it traces circles on the kitchen counter.

Wanda gives her a stern, albeit confused, look. “Why would you do that?”

Agatha shrugs but doesn’t look up. “Boredom, mostly.” She heaves a sigh and then glances up with a wicked grin. “I’m interested in seeing how you’ll fuck it up if—”

“No, thank you.”

Eventually, Wanda pours herself a bath, fills it with the good stuff, sinks beneath the hot water and the layers of bubbles until only her nose and eyes creep above them, and sits. Rests. She curves one of the few runes she knows on the inside of the bathtub and notices the way it flickers a soft purple before disappearing. One corner of her lips lifts as she hums with approval.

Not contentment.

Then she stretches out, rests her neck against the curve of the tub, and leans her head back, Agatha’s dark hair a shining raven when wet, dripping onto the tiled floor. It toks as she closes her eyes, listens to it. Not quite like the ticking of a clock, far more squelching and wet.

Plip. Plop.

With her eyes closed, sunk beneath the warm water and the bubbles, breathing in the scent of her soap, Wanda can almost – almost – pretend that she’s still in the Avengers Compound and that nothing that’s happened in the past several years has happened. She can pretend that, in just a few moments, as soon as she gets out of the tub, she can look into the main room and see Natasha curled up in one of the corner chairs with a book while Steve plays one of the movies he’d missed while he was under the ice. She can pretend that, as soon as she’s dried and in something comfortable, she can go into the room with them, can see Natasha looking up from her book with a small smile, can sit next to Steve after he pats the cushion next to him, can point out one of her favorite shows because he hasn’t seen any of them. And of course, as soon as the theme song starts playing, there Vision would be, as though beckoned by the very sound of something she loves—

Then she opens her eyes, and she stares at the ceiling, and she sighs as the water grows increasingly tepid and the bubbles pop and fade.

She can’t be sure if Agatha has been reading her thoughts, but when she leaves the bathroom, a towel wrapped around her, Wanda catches sight of the other witch curled up on one corner of the couch, remote placed on the cushion next to her, as the theme song for The Munsters plays softly in the background. Agatha glances up, and Wanda meets her own, soft as an abandoned forest.

Agatha offers her a soft smile before her gaze returns to the television.

Wanda returns a few moments later in a silken set of pajamas she’d found in Agnes’s drawers weeks ago and settles on the couch next to her. “Still bored?”

“Sure, hon.” Agatha’s gaze doesn’t leave the television. As the characters speak, her lips move with theirs, although no sound comes out. Even though she has it memorized, she still smiles at the familiar joke. “This helps.”

This show is less familiar to Wanda. Her dad only had the set when she was much younger, and she’d been so young that the characters had all frightened her. Now, though, she can see that while they might all look like monsters, they were just a normal family. They didn’t even know what they were or that people saw them any differently than everyone else. It’s oddly—

“Teach me, if you want,” Wanda says when the credits roll. Her lips press together, and she refuses to meet Agatha’s eyes. “I’m getting bored, too.”

Agatha reaches over, oddly hesitant, and then cards her finger through Wanda’s dark waves. “You’re doing a horrible job with this, hon,” she murmurs. “Let me comb it out for you.”

Wanda shivers, gets up, and walks away.

It takes another round of days unnumbered, wherein Agatha slowly but surely teaches Wanda her magical basics, before Wanda gets up the gumption to ask. In Wanda’s mind, it’s easiest to ask this sort of question when it’s dark, when they’re curled up in bed facing opposite walls, when she can feel Agatha’s back pressed against hers, knows she should feel the pain of it through her own back and only doesn’t because Agatha took pity on her. She can ask without seeing Agatha’s expression etched onto her own face reflected back at her. That’s easier.

“Agatha?” Her voice is so small that she can barely hear it herself, but there’s no hope that Agatha doesn’t hear it.

“Yes, dear?”

And still, Wanda hesitates. Tugs the edge of her sleep shirt between clenched hands. Runs a finger along the stomach of the body she inhabits. “You have stretch marks.”

It isn’t a question; it’s a statement, but Wanda asks it with that slight upturn of her voice that suggests a question, even if the words say otherwise.

Agatha stills so completely that Wanda can’t even feel her breathe. Maybe, for a moment, she stops. (Maybe Wanda is so scared of the answer that she’s the one not breathing. She can’t tell.) Then, quietly, she says, “Yes, hon. I do.”

That isn’t the answer Wanda wanted, but if she’s really honest with herself, Wanda doesn’t know what she does want. She takes a deep breath in, stilling herself, and then asks, voice still just as soft, “What are they from?”

Agatha snorts, but not in the way that suggests there’s any mirth to it. “Stretch marks come from a lot of things, hon. Just skin stretching too fast. Might’ve eaten too much all at once. You never know—”

“Agatha.”

Wanda speaks softly, comfortingly – as much as she can with Agatha’s voice, which seems to insistent on being…being other. She licks her lips, rolls them together, and then forces herself to ask, “What happened to your kids?”

“That’s a bit of a leap, hon,” Agatha spits in Wanda’s voice, which somehow makes it hurt more, “assuming I have kids just because my skin’s split, just because you have stretch marks from—”

“Stop, stop.” Wanda curls tighter on herself, pulling away from Agatha’s back, but as she spirals into a more fetal position, she butts up against her again. “We don’t have to…we can drop it.”

For a long, long moment, Agatha doesn’t say anything, and Wanda is convinced that the other witch has done exactly what she’s said – that she’s dropped it. Then Agatha takes in a shuddering sort of breath, lets it out long and hard, and says, “Dead, hon.”

Wanda’s heart grows cold. “What do you mean—”

“Just what I said, hon.” Agatha’s tone is soft in Wanda’s voice. “They’re long dead.”

Wanda waits again, mistakenly assuming that Agatha will continue unprompted, but the witch wrapped in her skin says nothing more. Maybe she should listen to her own advice and drop it. But Wanda’s never been good at listening to anyone’s advice, let alone her own, and so she asks, “What happened to them?”

Agatha snorts. “Like you care.”

In a move that surprisingly shows how much she does, Wanda doesn’t press further and lets the conversation lie.

The first time Wanda lets out one of Agatha’s dark violetly violent blasts, the entire house shakes.

Agatha catches it in one hand and appears to absorb it, although Wanda knows she has no such ability. When Wanda’s eyes narrow, Agatha smirks. “The Scarlet Witch is capable of changing reality, hon. It just never existed.” At her words, the damage done to the house repairs itself – no, doesn’t repair anything; it’s as though the damage was never done in the first place, as though Wanda has blinked and everything is immediately as it was before.

It’s deeply unsettling.

“Can’t you just—” Wanda waves one arm, making a bit of magic thread briefly through her fingers before it flickers away. “—put things back together?”

Agatha raises an eyebrow. “I’m not a child, babe, and the world isn’t one of your kids’ Lego sets. Why would I waste precious energy piecing the puzzle of your wreckage together when I can just snap your fingers and—” She snaps, and the interior of the house around them disappears, replaced with the wreckage of Wanda’s childhood apartment in Sokovia; snaps again, and that apartment fixes itself, just as it had been before Stark’s bomb hit, only devoid of any other life; snaps a third time and returns them to Agnes’s house in Westview.

As soon as they return, Wanda pushes past her, knocking her shoulder into Agatha’s, teeth gritting together. “You don’t have to be an ass.”

Neither do you.

Wanda catches just enough of Agatha’s own voice to turn to the other witch before realizing it was spoken directly into her mind. Agatha can’t speak with her own voice anymore. Only Wanda’s.

She shudders.

“Do you have any grandchildren?” Wanda asks, curled up in bed, staring at the wall, unable to fall asleep. Maybe she’s curious, maybe she just wants to hit at Agatha for hitting at her earlier, maybe it’s both and something else that she cannot name.

Either way, she can’t see the way Agatha’s expression screws over her own face when she says, blunt, “No.”

Once, exactly once, Agatha throws a scarlet blast of her own at Wanda, and Wanda, forgetting that she is in Agatha’s body, forgetting that she could absorb the magic thrown at her, dodges out of the way as neatly as she can. The magic itself doesn’t graze her arm, but a fragment of detritus does, and she glares up at Agatha with a hand over her shoulder. “What was that for?”

“You forget who you are, hon,” Agatha says, stitching Wanda’s skin back together without the wave of a hand, “and you forget me, too.”

Agatha only leaves the house by teleportation, and Wanda suspects that has more to do with the way the citizens in Westview would react to her – would react to someone who looks like Wanda – than it does with any real desire to teleport anywhere. She never buys anything, never goes shopping, but she always come back with something stuck in her mouth – usually a lollipop or popsicle, but just as often a strand of wheat as though she could make Wanda’s body look like a cowboy. She does, once, come back with that strand of wheat, with a cowboy hat propped onto her head, with boots with spurs covered with dirt, looking for all the world like a cowgirl and smelling strongly of one, too.

Wanda doesn’t ask because she doesn’t believe Agatha will answer, but she glares at her all the same, hands clenched into little fists. “Don’t use my body for—”

“You put me in this situation, super star,” Agatha interrupts as she pushes by her. “I think that means you don’t get to complain.”

For all that Agatha seemed to be giddy about having Wanda’s body – and therefore her power – something in her tone suggests that she is just as tired, frustrated, exasperated with their arrangement as Wanda herself is. But that can’t be true. If she was, then she would change them back just as easily as Wanda had put them there in the first place. Easier, even.

But she doesn’t.

Wanda does her research before she asks again, goes to the Westview library and runs her fingers through far too many historical books that are likely less than accurate, and uses their computer and their internet to search into the even less accurate parts of the world wide web. (She doesn’t want Agatha reading over her shoulder, but she still feels as though she is.) This time, when she asks, “How did they die?” she thinks she already has the answer.

She has half of it.

“You’re not going to let this go, are you, hon?” Agatha sighs and shifts on the mattress – Wanda has a distinct image of the woman pushing a hand through Wanda’s auburn hair, brushing it back out of her face – before continuing. “The seventeenth century wasn’t good for child mortality. The youngest of my twins, my baby, died before he was a year old. We didn’t know why then, and you still don’t know why now. Sometimes, death just happens.”

The next question leaps far too quickly to Wanda’s lips, and she stifles it down, forces herself to quiet as she waits for Agatha to speak.

“Nicholas made it nearly to three years old before my sister burned him alive.”

Wanda’s breath catches in her throat.

The mattress shifts, and Agatha’s breath comes warm at the nape of Wanda’s – Agatha’s own – neck. “Does that answer your question, hon?”

At her words, the ache in Wanda’s own heart cries out, and she curls up tight in on herself. She doesn’t say it, but she thinks it, an apology not to Agatha and not to herself and not to her boys, but maybe to all of the above.

Silently, Agatha wraps Wanda’s own arms around her waist and sets her chin on her own shoulder. She holds her, says nothing as Wanda shivers silently in her grasp, and then says, finally, “Sometimes, hon, there isn’t anything you do. No matter how hard you try. But you and I? We’re made of the same cloth. You’re strong. And you will make it through this.”

Wanda doesn’t say anything. After all of that, what would she say?

#bandit fic #wundagore punishment with wanda and agatha #wanda maximoff #scarlet witch #agatha harkness #wandavision #mcu #wandagatha #wagatha #harximoff #wanda maximoff x agatha harkness #agatha harkness x wanda maximoff #wandagatha week 2023 #chapter five

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aparticularbandit · 11 months

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The Curse

Summary: Agnes is no medical doctor. She was quite right about that.

Not only is Agnes no medical doctor, but she has no medical experience. At all. She’s a suburban housewife, one who has lost her husband (not that she’d ever had one, but she doesn’t know that), lost her kids (not that Wanda remembers giving her kids, so that must have pulled itself in from something within Agatha, not that she wants to know), and lost her best friend to—

Well, she hasn’t lost her best friend anymore, has she?

Wandagatha Week 2023 Prompt 1: Villains

Wanda Maximoff/Agatha Harkness Rating: T.

AO3

previous chapter

Her entire body screams.

She should be used to this feeling because a part of her mind, shoved back far, far away, also constantly screams. Most of the time, she ignores it, but every now and again, she reaches out to it, checks in on it, and finds it still screaming. It’s as if the part of her that collapses just before her magic takes on a mind of its own has been locked back there, only with a little more free will. That part of her, still screaming, occasionally pounds against the walls of the corner where she’s locked it and forces her to acknowledge it, but she doesn’t dwell there. Can’t dwell there. Refuses to dwell there. Shoves it away again and forces herself forward.

(And, yes, she does call it magic now. She’s acknowledged that. Accepted it. Killed so many people with it. Became exactly what Tony Stark—)

But it’s different, her body screaming instead of just her head, pain rippling through her, with every flinch of her muscles, every furrowing of her brow, every subtle (or unsubtle) attempt at movement sending spasms under her skin, until she finally simply ceases.

Maybe this is what death feels like. An eternity of unending pain, unless she stops moving. Gives up. Gives in.

It would be easier to give in if she had something to distract her from that part of her head that’s still screaming—

“Hon, you’ve got to drink something, I don’t…. I don’t have any IVs, and I’m not a doctor, and I don’t think—”

Wanda’s entire body flinches. She tries to snap herself up and awake, but she barely moves an inch before her entire body lights on fire. The most she can do is open her eyes and glare at the woman above her.

Agnes’s brow – Agatha’s, technically, but Agatha wouldn’t care about her this much – knits together, lips pressed into a thin line, until she notices that Wanda’s eyes are open, and then her entire face lights up, lips spreading into an endearing smile. “Oh, you’re awake, good, good, here, will you just—?” She holds a cup of water in one hand – a plastic cup with a lid and an equally plastic straw (that she must have gotten from Burger King or McDonald’s or some other cheap fast food joint because it’s one of those white ones with the red and yellow and blue stripes surrounding it) – and sets the straw on Wanda’s lips. “I need you to drink something, dear. Wouldn’t want you to thirst to death.” She pauses, brow furrowing again, and licks her lips. “Is that the right phrase? Thirst to death? Like starving to death, but with water.” Her gaze flinches away. “There’s got to be an easier way to say that than die of dehydration—”

If endless pain with every movement is death, then maybe this is hell.

Lying here unmoving won’t make the woman above go away, not if she wants her to drink something, so Wanda parts her chapped, cracked, dried out lips and sucks on the straw. It hurts to drink anything at all, hurts to swallow, hurts to cough so that she doesn’t quite choke on her water (her body will absorb it, just like it would absorb chips of ice; it’s hard to choke on water) – but the water itself is cool and refreshing and she finds herself wanting more of it, no matter how hard it is to drink, how long it is for her to get any of it at all.

Water’s the one thing that doesn’t hurt.

Agnes smiles again as she drinks, and she brushes strands of Wanda’s hair back out of her face with fingertips so feather soft that it’s nearly calming. Would be calming if it wasn’t Agnes. “Good girl,” she murmurs when the straw starts to make that annoying, unsettling sound of there not being enough water to draw anything up. Then she bends down as though to do something else, hesitates, and then stands up, the now quite empty plastic cup in her hand. “I’ll be back with more, hon, don’t you worry!”

As Agnes slips out of the room, Wanda mentally reaches out – intentionally in a way that she rarely if ever does, except on that kid at Kamar-Taj, except when she needed someone to run, except when she needs people to obey her without having to argue with them – and just touches the second mind within Agnes.

The screaming in the back of her mind grows louder, angrier, echoing and reverberating in a lower tone, a mish-mash of notes that don’t quite make a harmony, make something just slightly off, setting her teeth on edge and causing her to flinch away so hard that her full body flinches again, and pain rips through her once more.

Well.

That answers that question.

(Except it doesn’t, not really, it doesn’t answer her question at all, it doesn’t answer why she’s here when she should be dead.

Maybe, if she waits long enough—)

Agnes is no medical doctor. She was quite right about that.

Well, she hasn’t lost her best friend anymore, has she?

Not only has Agnes reclaimed her lost best friend, she’s reclaimed a bit of purpose in life. She looks after Wanda the way she might have looked after one of her sons (who she only on occasion mentions, but never in the way she does anything else, never in a way that suggests she wants Wanda to ask (not that she would) or in a way where she rambles on about them the way she always does about Ralph)—

Maybe she dotes after Wanda more because she has no one else.

(This isn’t, strictly speaking, true. Wanda has heard the knocks that come to Agnes’s door, and she’s heard the whispered voices. She knows that Agnes isn’t always around, knows that sometimes she’s somewhere else, doesn’t know where she goes, doesn’t ask.)

Maybe, quite by accident, Wanda put something into Agnes that makes her—

(She refuses to think about that, refuses to think what that might say about her.)

Maybe she’s just honestly afraid that Wanda might actually die.

(Wanda wishes.)

But despite having no medical experience (other than what she must have learned in raising the boys she mentioned, other than what she might have learned for other family members that she never mentions), Agnes takes great care to help Wanda heal. She brings her water, she brings her chips of ice to make sure she can chew before giving her any food at all, she brings her smoothies and protein shakes on the days when all she can do is drink, when she cannot chew at all, and she brings her good stuff, too, not protein shakes that taste like dirt, not smoothies that have the wrong flavors mixed together, actually good stuff—

Which is probably part of the suburban nosy neighbor housewife stereotype that Wanda baked into her; Agnes probably knows all sorts of yoga tips and tricks, and the best sort of all organic non-GMO smoothies for boosting various vitamins and antioxidants, and protein shakes maybe for her lost husband or her lost sons because maybe one of them was an athlete or a body builder or—

Somewhere along the way, Wanda’s body stops screaming.

Mostly.

Agnes tries, multiple times, to scrub the inky black stains from Wanda’s fingertips. No matter what she does, they never come off. At first, she’s gentle with them the way she is with everything else; when Wanda can’t move herself, can’t bathe herself, Agnes does it for her, just the way a nurse might, careful and gentle, but when she gets to those stains….

Her lips press together in a firmer line, and her nose wiggles a few times as she mutters something under her breath. “Dear, it’s like you’ve burned them. I don’t think I could even get this off with bleach!”

Wanda doesn’t know how much magic she can still access right now, but she immediately reaches out and—

She can’t modify the Agnes spell, but she can add another one on top of it. That should be fine, shouldn’t it? Just another spell to make sure she doesn’t use bleach on people, which feels like it should be common sense, but when it comes to Agnes…. Well, taking care of Wanda the way she is can’t be common sense, can it? So there’s got to be a loose screw in there somewhere.

(It’s probably Agatha. Mucking everything up. Again.)

After that, Agnes ignores her fingers and cleans them the way that she cleans everything else.

It takes a few weeks of Agnes’s idle chatting – and Wanda’s body slowly healing – before Wanda reaches out to touch the mind within her again.

This time, Wanda hears no screaming, no anger, no frustration, no nothing. Her brow furrows with the barest tinge of pain, and she reaches further. Still nothing. Which is concerning.

So the next time Agnes checks in on her, Wanda forces herself to sit up as much as she can, propping herself up on her elbows and ignoring the sharp welt of pain that creeps up her spine and then settles into a low ache. “Agnes,” she says with a voice rasping with disuse.

Agnes freezes. She turns with a brightening smile – “You’re talking!” – and immediately sits herself down on the edge of Wanda’s mattress, just near the curve of her hip. As soon as she does, her smile fades, as does the light in her eyes. “Do you…do you know what happened, dear? I’ve been taking care of you for,” her gaze drops, and she starts to idly fiddle with a loose thread on her plaited skirt, “for a while now, and—”

“Hush.”

The word croaks its way through Wanda’s lips as she reaches out and places her fingertips on Agnes’s forehead. She closes her eyes as Agnes freezes much more completely than before – like a television show on pause, rather than a living breathing person unsteady and unsure of herself – and pushes more directly into Agnes’s mind, ignoring the uncertain but very definite attraction she finds on the surface (definite to her, but Agnes is uncertain, despite the many times she’d read books with this exact scenario, albeit much straighter) and looking deeper, into the murky depths: in the same corner in her own mind where she’d shoved her own screaming self, she searches for the other person who absolutely should still be there.

It takes more than a moment before she finds her, if it can even be called a moment – it’s hard to tell time when she’s swimming in someone else’s mind – but she does find her, standing just as she had when she led Wanda through her own memories, one arm crossed, her cheek resting on the other fist, bright blue eyes gazing at her inquisitively, wry smile on her lips. Like she knows more about any of this than Wanda does. Like she knows anything about any of this.

Instinctively, Wanda’s eyes narrow. “You’re supposed to be in pain.”

Agatha gives a shrug of one shoulder – she’s even still in the same outfit, that purple sweater over a purple button-up, the collar just peeking through and above the other, like she’s some sort of attractive professor and Wanda’s just…just….

“Must have done something wrong, hon. It’s all nice and cozy in here.” Agatha’s smile doesn’t drop, but her eyes wander along Wanda’s form, taking her in. “Surprised to see you, though. Agnes was having a whole Janet with Rocky affair out there.”

Wanda blinks. Twice. “What?”

Agatha groans and rubs her forehead. “Rocky Horror Picture Show. You’ve never—” She lets out a sound of disgust. “Harley and Joker? Florence Nightingale? Marty McFly and his mom?”

“Got it, got it.” Wanda winces, shudders. “And no. Gross. You’re—” She pauses, takes a second to take Agatha in, appraising her, and then shudders again. “I can’t believe you’re suggesting—”

“You’re worse than the Puritans.”

“I’m—”

Agatha waves a hand dismissively and then twists it just so, causing a pair of chairs to appear. “Sit, dear,” she says, “and tell me why you’re here.”

Wanda’s eyes narrow again as Agatha settles into one of the chairs. She doesn’t sit. “The last time I checked on you, you were screaming.”

“Intruder alert, hon.” Agatha lifts one corner of her lips in a knowing smile. “Someone breaks into your mind, first thing you want to do is yell at them. Like a stray cat. Scat!”

Wanda doesn’t believe her, but it’s hard not to when Agatha seems so…calm. She presses her lips together and then, finally, asks, “Why am I here?”

Agatha heaves a huge sigh. “Hon, I believe I just asked you—”

“Not here here,” Wanda interrupts with a growl, “but here. With Agnes. You don’t have magic. She doesn’t have magic. How am I here?”

For a moment, Agatha doesn’t answer. Instead, she conjures what looks to be a cup of tea and sips at it, considering her. Then, finally, she asks, “What happened to the Darkhold, super star?” Her tone takes on the same sort of patronizing softness and false gentility it held when she was leading Wanda through her memories.

It makes Wanda shudder again.

“It’s gone.” Wanda holds Agatha’s gaze. “Destroyed.”

“By someone else, or you would be a tub of ash.” Agatha circles her finger above her cup of tea, as though stirring it. “Did you go to Wundagore?”

Wanda’s eyes widen. “You know about Wundagore?”

Agatha just shrugs again. “Went there for a weekend trip with an old friend once. Had a roaring good time.” Her eyes meet Wanda’s briefly. “Doesn’t look like you did.”

“What do you mean?” Wanda asks hesitantly, cautiously.

“Come here, pet,” Agatha says instead, patting the chair next to her. “Sit with me a spell.”

The problem – the absolute worst problem – with Agatha Harkness is that she was very often very right. For all she pretended to be someone else, when it got down to brass tacks, when she spoke as herself, she didn’t really lie. The question would always be whether she is currently speaking as herself or if she’s trying to speak in the context of some other role she’s cast for herself.

Wanda gives a shake of her head. “No,” she says. “I’m fine here.” She crosses her arms. “I’m sure you’ve got a theory. Spill.”

“Why should I?” Agatha asks, setting her teacup to one side with another sigh. “You’ve given me no reason to help you, hon. Trapped me in here,” she raises a finger gesturing to the empty space around them, “and then barge inside to demand answers from me like you’re owed them.” She shrugs a third time. “Maybe offer me something,” she says, smile returning to her lips. “Something nice.”

Wanda’s eyes narrow again. “I’m not letting you out.”

Agatha laughs – high-pitched, mechanical – the fake sort of witch’s cackle that can’t be how she really laughs – all for show, not with any real mirth. “Oh, hon, I wouldn’t ask for that. You’d lie through your teeth and then leave me in the wash. I won’t ask for that.” She pretends to wipe a tear from her eye. “Just come visit me again,” she says, voice softening. “Not because you need anything. Just for a cup of tea. Sit by the fire.” She waves a hand and a fireplace with a roaring fire appears just behind both of their chairs. It flashes orange light around her black waves, and Wanda has to look away, missing Agatha’s expression when she murmurs, “It gets lonely in here, buttercup.”

The fire crackles and pops the same way a real one might. Wanda dismisses it with the same wave of her hand that Agatha used to create it. “What’s your theory?”

“Hm.” Agatha pulls her cup back over, gazes into her tea, and smiles. “What happened at Wundagore, Wanda?”

“I destroyed it.” Wanda clenches her hand into fists. “It needed to be destroyed.”

Now, Agatha does laugh – something real, something just as wrong as it is right – covering her head with one hand and snorting before she catches her breath. “Wanda, dear, if the person who destroyed the Darkhold got turned into ash, what did you think Wundagore would do to the person who destroyed it? Did you think it would kill you?”

Wanda doesn’t blink, just stares levelly at her.

“Ah.” Agatha’s smile fades, softens. “No, hon, Wundagore has something much more sinister in mind. Death is too easy. Just like you thought it was too easy for me.”

Wanda waits for an explanation, and when none comes, she asks, “What do you mean?”

Agatha taps her teacup with one finger. She doesn’t hesitate, just takes Wanda in again, appraises her, and sighs. “Wundagore paired you with me because I suspect I’m the person alive you hate the most.” She snorts half-heartedly. “Your own personal villain.”

My own personal— Wanda’s eyes narrow again. “You’re saying I’m here because we hate each other? Because I’m torturing you the way it wants to torture me? For destroying it?”

“Oh, Wundagore doesn’t care what I think, hon.” Agatha gestures around them with one finger. “It doesn’t matter if I hate you or not, only that you hate me. Out of anywhere you could be, this is where you least want to be. So Wundagore sent you here.”

Wanda stares at her. “So when I get better, I can just leave?”

Agatha glances up and meets her eyes. “I’m not sure it’ll be that easy, hon. Curses – if you’re in one – can take a lot to break. You might need some help.” She takes another sip of her tea. “Or not. You are the Scarlet Witch, after all. You can bend reality to your will. A simple curse should be child’s play for someone like you.”

“Great.” Wanda doesn’t mention that she’s never broken a curse before, doesn’t feel like revealing any of that information to her nemesis. She turns away. “Thanks for the information, Agatha. I’ll be back for our cup of tea eventually.” She hesitates, one lip curling with her own personal amusement. “Maybe after I break the curse.”

She leaves before she can hear Agatha’s response, not wanting to hear anything witty or pithy or the expected you say that now, but just wait – like if she needed Agatha now, then she’ll need her again in the future. None of that matters. She has her answer; all she has to do now is focus on getting better. She can test things out more after that.

Wanda pulls back out of Agnes’s mind, not even noting the attraction she had on the way in, and collapses back on her pillows and mattress, exhausted by the exertion of her magic. She stares at Agnes – who, perhaps, she does not hate and would not hate if not for the woman trapped inside her – and lets out a little huff before reaching over, placing a hand over Agnes’s, and murmuring, “It’s okay. You can breathe.”

All at once, Agnes takes a deep breath in, coughs twice, spluttering, and places a hand on her chest. Her eyes widen, and she licks her lips twice before she turns back to Wanda. “Sorry, dear,” she says with a look of chagrin. “Sudden coughing spat. I’m not sick!” She turns her other hand over under Wanda’s and gives her a little smile. “I’m glad I could hear your voice again.”

Wanda just stares up at her, opens her mouth as though to speak, thinks better of it, and then gives a tired nod.

#bandit fic #wundagore punishment with wanda and agatha #wanda maximoff #scarlet witch #agatha harkness #agnes bohner #wandavision #mcu #wandagatha #wagatha #harximoff #wanda maximoff x agatha harkness #agatha harkness x wanda maximoff #wandagatha week 2023 #consider this chapter one

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aparticularbandit · 11 months

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The Argument

Summary: Agatha chuckles, a soft sound, not nearly as harsh as her ecstatic cackling. “Oh, dear, you have my magic. You wove that into the Agnes spell, which, as I already said, I dispelled. You just don’t know how to use it.” She reaches forward and pats Wanda’s head twice, opens her mouth to speak, as though to continue her patronizing, and then pauses, runs her fingers through her own dark waves, and sighs in a way that makes Wanda shiver unpleasantly. “I could have so much fun with you, pet.”

For Wandagatha Week Prompt 5: Jealousy.

Wanda Maximoff/Agatha Harkness Rating: T.

AO3

previous chapter / next chapter

Normal witchcraft.

Wanda turns the phrase over in her mind just long enough to ignore it before deciding to widen her stance and—

Immediately, a throb of pain courses up her back – Agatha’s back – and Wanda hunches over, mouth open in a sharp gasp. She takes a breath in, waits for the pain to disperse with one arm wrapped around her stomach, and then glares up at Agatha. “What did you do?” she asks, punctuating each word.

“I didn’t do anything, hon,” Agatha says, “other than getting rid of Agnes. Which you should be thanking me for.” She curls back up on the top of her stool, and it’s only then that Wanda notices how her feet are bare, each toenail painted a bright sparkling scarlet, as she curls her toes around one of the rungs on the stool. Her head tilts to one side, again mimicking Wanda, and her eyes do not widen with shock the way Wanda wants them to. Instead, she just stares, examines, near clinical.

Wanda didn’t know her own expressions could be so cold.

“The pain,” Wanda gasps out, slowly straightening up, careful when another twinge hits her, “in your back.” She continues to glare at Agatha. “Agnes didn’t feel like this. What did you—”

“I told you, hon. I got rid of Agnes.” Agatha’s – Wanda’s – soft green eyes grow cold. “Agnes ran on a curse you created. You didn’t know about that, so she didn’t have it.” She leans forward with a sneer. “But I do.” One shoulder lifts in a shrug. “Or did.”

Wanda’s eyes narrow. “You never acted like this.”

Agatha sighs, lifts a finger, and conjures a single golden circle, twists her hand – signs and symbols that Wanda remembers seeing Stephen Strange use in the brief moments they’d been together start to hover in the air. Then she taps the center, and the pain in Wanda’s – Agatha’s – back disappears. She meets Wanda’s eyes with hers. “Better, buttercup?”

It takes a moment. Wanda finishes straightening. Shifts a bit. Shakes her arms out. Nothing, no response, no sudden back ache or twinge or sharp stab of pain. Her gaze lifts and tries to meet Agatha’s – and it’s so, so weird, looking at…at herself, but reflected. But, then, this is how everyone else sees her, isn’t it? Not as a mirror image, but as herself. Still, it’s odd.

“You know sorcery?”

“Spent a hundred years or so learning from that arrogant prick’s predecessor.” Agatha gazes at her thumbnail, picks something out from under it, and flicks it away. “So yeah. I know sorcery.”

Wanda blinks twice. She’d never considered learning sorcery. Never thought that a witch could. Of course, she also hadn’t known she was a witch until recently, and then the only book she’d had was the Darkhold. More importantly, she’d never considered that there was a Sorcerer Supreme before.... Well, Wong was Supreme now, even though he let Stephen speak for him, but Agatha’s words – arrogant prick – sounded more like Stephen. Whichever, she hadn’t thought about a…before.

While she considers this, Agatha avoids her gaze, and when the silence lingers on a little too long, she says, “I know witchcraft, too, which is better than I can say for you, little Miss Priss.”

“Miss Priss?” Wanda echoes, suddenly brought back to reality. “What am I, a cat?” She gives a shake of her head, one hand raised. “No, no, don’t answer that. Just teach me how to use your magic so I can blast you.” Her eyes narrow, stance shifted, now that her – Agatha’s – back doesn’t hurt, and sets her hands out in front of her again.

But Agatha just cackles. Doubles over in laughter, Wanda’s auburn hair falling about her face, hand pressed to her face. She shakes with it, stamps one foot on the stool rung twice.

“What?” Wanda asks, glaring at her. “What’s so funny?”

Agatha pushes her hand through Wanda’s hair as she quiets. Her gaze sweeps over to Wanda, emerald eyes flashing brightly. “You, hon.” The smile never drops from her lips. “You really think I’m going to teach you to, how did you say it, blast me?” She rolls her eyes and straightens up, standing and placing both hands in the small of her – Wanda’s – back until it crackles. “It took decades to master that spell enough to cast it without incantations, and you think you’re just going to pick it up in a day? No, no.” She steps forward to Wanda, who tries hopelessly to funnel magic – anything – out of her hands like she always does only for nothing to happen, and says, wagging her finger, “Sunshine, you have been living life on easy mode, and now—” she boops Wanda’s nose, “—you’re going to have to level up.” One corner of her lips curves up again. “You’ve played Metroid, haven’t you, hon?”

“No.” Wanda’s nose scrunches up in disbelief. “I don’t even know what that is.”

“Funny. Your boys did—”

Wanda shoves her, and for an instant, Agatha stumbles. Then the woman wearing Wanda’s body holds her hands up, pulling up a scarlet shield and holding it between them. Her expression flickers, only to return with a wicked cackle of a grin. “See?” she purrs. “Easy mode.”

When the shield fades, Wanda steps forward as though to shove her again. Agatha holds a hand up, and a scarlet shield fizzles into place between them. It remains in place as Wanda punches against it, trying to get Agatha’s own magic to trigger, to suck her own magic back into her. But no matter what she does, there’s nothing. Her eyes narrow. “You didn’t give me your magic.”

Agatha chuckles, a soft sound, not nearly as harsh as her ecstatic cackling. “Oh, dear, you have my magic. You wove that into the Agnes spell, which, as I already said, I dispelled. You just don’t know how to use it.” She reaches forward and pats Wanda’s head twice, opens her mouth to speak, as though to continue her patronizing, and then pauses, runs her fingers through her own dark waves, and sighs in a way that makes Wanda shiver unpleasantly. “I could have so much fun with you, pet.”

Wanda bats her hand away. “Stop. Stop touching me.”

Agatha steps back and holds her hands out, gesturing like Vanna White to the body she currently inhabits. “You put me here, babe. I don’t really have much of a—”

“It was supposed to send me back when I was healed, and you’re walking around like nothing hurts you at all.” Wanda glares at her. “I should be back now.”

“So you made another broken spell.” Agatha shrugs one shoulder. She walks back to her stool, curls up atop it, and gives a little shake of her head. “I don’t know why you’re surprised.” She sighs and rests her head on one hand. “Don’t know why I’m surprised either. You don’t know witchcraft—”

Wanda tunes Agatha out as she tries to think about what’s going on. First – Agatha came back. Agatha Harkness, whose primary plan was to steal her magic, now has her magic and came back…why? Second, Agatha dispelled the Agnes spell in a way that she said meant Wanda should be able to access Agatha’s magic, although a part of her thinks that’s a lie, otherwise something should have happened by now. Her gaze shifts upward; no runes anywhere she can see, so it isn’t that. Again, that doesn’t make any sense. Agatha has what she wants, so why would—

“You want your body back,” Wanda muses out loud, glancing up to meet Agatha’s eyes. “That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? You want your body back just as much as I want mine.”

Agatha raises one eyebrow. “You think I want that old thing back?” She gestures to Wanda – to her body. “You know how its back aches, you know I want your magic, and yet you think—”

“But you don’t have your body.”

“Hon. Honestly.” Agatha snaps her fingers, and immediately, the body she wears shifts its shape into the spitting image of her own. “Your magic gives me the power to bend reality to my will, and you don’t think I can make this body look however I want?”

Wanda crosses her arms and raises an eyebrow. “That’s just an illusion.”

But at her words, Agatha snaps her fingers again, and Wanda’s form, too, shifts. She doesn’t have to look to know that this body – Agatha’s body – has been changed to resemble her own. Wanda knows her own body, knows the shape and form of it, and knows when what she’s wearing feels like it. But it still isn’t hers, and so she still feels…off.

She can only hope that Agatha feels the same way.

Agatha gestures again, holding one hand flat in front of her. “Illusion, hon?”

Wanda shudders. “Why are you here, Agatha? You got what you want. You could have left me locked up. You didn’t. Why?”

For a moment, Agatha doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t meet Wanda’s eyes; instead, she waves her hand, and both of their bodies return to the way they were before. Then she reaches down, tugs at the edge of her dress, and brushes imagined dust away from her dress. Eventually, she glances up. “Maybe, hon, you should just be glad for the favor.” Her lips curve into something akin to a smile, but she doesn’t even seem happy. “And don’t bite the hand that saves you.” A moment more, then she winks. “Unless you want to—”

“Ew, gross, no.” Wanda turns away from her, crossed arms tightening as though to soothe herself. She rubs her arms – Agatha’s arms, not hers; she hates this – and shivers again. It strikes her that if Agatha wanted to kill her, she probably could. That she hadn’t.

It isn’t that Wanda wouldn’t prefer to be dead, but she’d rather it wasn’t Agatha Harkness who killed her.

“I can’t…I can’t make you leave,” Wanda says, slowly, “and I don’t…I don’t want to keep talking with you. So.” She turns away and stalks off down the hallway, back to Agnes’s bedroom. It isn’t her bedroom, but it’s…it’s something. It has a bed (that still smells like Agnes, and not like her) and a dressing table with a mirror (that shows her that she still looks like Agnes – like Agatha, but the better version of her), and she curls up facing away from the mirror and buries her head into her pillow.

Agnes’s pillow.

Wanda groans, a sound that grows even deeper when she feels the press of weight on the other side of the mattress. “Can’t you just go away?”

“No, hon.” Agatha snorts. “That’s part of the curse. It plopped you here, and it makes me come back.” She flattens onto the mattress just next to Wanda, back up against hers – likely staring into the mirror in a way that Wanda is intentionally avoiding. “You know, if I’d had your power, I would have known not to blow up Wundagore.”

Wanda grits her teeth together. “You have your own power. You don’t need mine.”

“It’s so easy, being you,” Agatha hisses, “and you don’t even know how to use it.” She heaves a huge sigh.

Wanda feels her back press harder up against hers at that breath before releasing. She’s warm. It’s…nice. Then the room flickers scarlet – against the wall, Wanda can see the shadow of her own hand, of a burst of magic fluttering just above it. The magic weaves through the shadowy fingers before disappearing. “You do,” Wanda says, finally, staring at the shadow. “You know how to use it. And it didn’t want you.”

“Doesn’t matter if it wants me or not, super star.” Agatha snorts. “You fucked up. And I’m not giving it—”

“I don’t care.” Wanda closes her eyes, refusing to look at even the shadow of her anymore. “Keep it. I don’t want it.”

Even with her eyes closed, Wanda can feel Agatha against her, can feel every breath she takes in, every breath she lets out. She waits for the other witch to say anything, but nothing comes. Eventually, the comfort of her breathing lulls her, and Wanda drifts into unconsciousness.

#bandit fic #wundagore punishment with wanda and agatha #wanda maximoff #scarlet witch #agatha harkness #wandavision #mcu #wandagatha #harximoff #wagatha #wanda maximoff x agatha harkness #agatha harkness x wanda maximoff #wandagatha week 2023 #chapter four

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aparticularbandit · 11 months

Text

The Kiss

Summary: Being stuck in the bed while Agnes doted on her, Wanda lost track of the days. Each of them bled one into the other; she hadn’t necessarily known how many days passed or how long she had been there. She could tell when it was day or not based on the way the light filtered through the blinds, but that gave her no sense of how long she’d been out, how many hours had passed. If it had been a month, months—

But living in Agnes, trapped here, Wanda is intimately familiar with each and every moment that she’s stuck there. Each day stretches on for an eternity; each moment feels like five. There is no escaping, no way to allow everything to bleed one into the other, even if she wanted that.

Just this aching need to get out.

For Wandagatha Week Prompt 3: Accidental Kiss.

Wanda Maximoff/Agatha Harkness Rating: T. Trigger Warning for Dubious Consent (re: kiss).

AO3

previous chapter / next chapter

So Wanda made a bad decision.

It is not the first time she has made a bad decision. It is also not the first time she has been locked up somewhere unable to—

No, no, there is no comparing this to The Raft. This is worse than The Raft. They might have put her in a straitjacket and a collar, but she could still see, she could still turn her head, she could still breathe. She was still in charge of her body, no matter how much they’d locked her up.

But this time? This time, Wanda is locked in someone else’s body, unable to speak, unable to see, unable to turn her head, unable to breathe – all of these are functions that Agnes has and does on her own without even thinking about the person stuck in that back corner of her head – while her own body is being piloted around by the witch she’d originally trapped in here.

It doesn’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any sense at all. When she’d visited Agatha, it hadn’t been anything like this. There’d been an empty blank black expanse, sure, but Agatha had been able to conjure chairs, books, tea, food, an entire fireplace with a roaring fire. They’d been able to sit and chat, for crying out loud! It had been nothing like this!

What happened?

Wanda runs through the scenario in her head again, but she can’t see the flaw in her plan. Unless the magic doesn’t function the way she thinks it does. Why would it function any differently? Why would whatever is happening with Agatha be different when she visits?

….

Because she visits.

But she can’t just change someone’s entire mindscape like that, can she? Agatha should still have been bound or tied up or locked up or something; she shouldn’t have just been free—

The part of Wanda that she keeps shoved in the back of her mind claws at her, rakes at her, yells louder and louder, and if she had any sort of body, she would double over, clutching her head with her hands, but she doesn’t have a body, she doesn’t have a head, she doesn’t have hands – she just has eyes that stay open when Agnes’s eyes are open and close when hers close, forcing her to see everything, everything, everything—

Being stuck in the bed while Agnes doted on her, Wanda lost track of the days. Each of them bled one into the other; she hadn’t necessarily known how many days passed or how long she had been there. She could tell when it was day or not based on the way the light filtered through the blinds, but that gave her no sense of how long she’d been out, how many hours had passed. If it had been a month, months—

Just this aching need to get out.

Agnes has friends, Wanda finds out. She volunteers at the library on her best days, spends her worst hours holding down a secretary position where she flirts aimlessly with her coworkers, where one that Wanda finds particularly creepy occasionally reaches over to pinch her thigh (or her ass). Wanda wants to slam him into the wall (although something in her says he’d like that), but Agnes just gives him a bright, encouraging smile. One that Wanda knows she doesn’t mean, because she either cries about it in the car on her drive home or punches the steering wheel a few times for it (and definitely vents about to one of her friends. Over a cup of wine. With ice. Agnes’s friends are weird).

For all that the woman who drinks wine with ice might be weird, though, she at least seems to be nice. To actually care. And, to her point, she asks after Wanda with concern in her eyes – although Wanda can’t tell if that’s concern for Agnes or for her.

It also means Agnes has talked about her at some point.

Agnes takes a deep, shuddering breath in and lets it out. “I haven’t seen her since…since she left.” She twists her skirt in her hands, doesn’t mean her friend’s eyes. “She never calls. I….” Her lips press together, and she shakes her head. “I don’t think she really cares too much about me, hon.” Her eyes lift, and she smiles.

That’s the thing about Agnes. She always smiles. Even when maybe she shouldn’t.

It’s…oddly endearing.

(Or would be if Wanda wasn’t stuck here seeing everything and wanting to shake her—)

“Maybe,” her friend says, “if you see her again, let her know how you feel.” She reaches across, places a hand over Agnes’s, and gives her a gentle squeeze. “Tell her you’d like to see her in your life more. Then, if that’s not what she wants, at least you get closure.” Her tone suggests that she already knows how the Wanda she has never met but only hears about from Agnes will respond and further suggests that it won’t be good.

(Wanda might be reading through the lines, but she thinks…she thinks there’s another layer here. But she can’t reach out and read the shallowest layer of the other woman’s mind, so she can’t confirm it. Honestly, she hates this.)

Agnes flushes a bright red at the touch of her friend’s hand. She swallows and nods twice. “I…I can do that, dear. I can tell her.”

(Her tone suggests otherwise. As does the fact that she had Wanda in her house for Wanda doesn’t even know how long and didn’t said anything at all. Not that Agnes is telling her friend anything about that.)

When Agnes leaves, she and her friend kiss each other’s cheeks, and Agnes giggles. The image – the false memory – comes on strong then, of time in another country, of Paris, of another friend who she used to do this with – comes so strong that Wanda can taste it.

She wonders, briefly, if this is really a false memory, or if it’s something that pulled in and crafted itself from Agatha’s brain before she—

Wanda tries not to think about Agatha.

It’s not as impossible as it seems, if she focuses on Agnes’s life, which, although repetitive and sad and on occasion boring, could be almost comforting, if she weren’t trapped here.

Agnes has a normal life. She has friends. She has a normal job. She doesn’t have to worry about magic or powers or superheroes or mistakes or accidentally (or intentionally) killing anyone. She doesn’t have to worry about carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders. She’s normal. Perhaps the most normal person Wanda has met in a really long time.

She can’t help but long for that.

(She should have switched places with Agnes, not with Agatha, but then…that wouldn’t be fair to Agnes, now, would it? Putting Agnes in her situation – or even in Agatha’s – that would be torture to someone who certainly didn’t deserve it in the slightest, didn’t deserve to be created just to then be thrown into—

Look at her. Thinking about Agnes as her own person, and not…not a magical script, playing itself out, like a television show character she could write stories about. Like she’s real.

Nothing about Agnes is real.

That’s the thing – if Agnes were a show or a book, Wanda could sink safely into everything that’s happening and enjoy it. But she’s not. Wanda’s stuck here, unable to turn the show off, unable to do anything else.

For all that she is being tortured, or that Agatha was, Wanda gave Agnes the life she wanted for herself.

A gift, for someone she’d—)

Wanda tries not to think about Agatha.

Because when Wanda starts to think about Agatha, she starts to wonder what, precisely, Agatha might be doing, out in the world, free again, finally, and wearing her body.

She starts to be afraid of what Agatha is using her body to do.

She gets sick, but she can’t get sick.

So she doesn’t think about it.

She tries, anyway.

When Agatha finally shows up again, Agnes notices her before Wanda does, and the warmth in her chest brings heartburn to Wanda as she says, voice bright, charming, “Wanda!”

Of course, Agatha doesn’t deign to meet them out in Westview proper; Agnes just swings the door to her house open wide, walks inside, and finds Agatha – who she thinks is Wanda – sitting on one of the stools pulled out from her kitchen island, one leg crossed over the other, a half-eaten apple in one hand, flecks of juice about her – Wanda’s – lips. Agatha wears Wanda’s body like a second skin, has it wrapped in…in clothes that are like what Wanda would wear but just off. Like…like she’d suddenly gained some sort of…of confidence – or, given Agatha, arrogance. All leggings that shimmer in the light and show off her legs without showing off her skin and a dress that might have well been pulled out of her closet when she first joined the Avengers, and rings, and….

Something within Wanda bristles with fire.

But for all that Agatha can feign being Wanda, she’s fully herself when she meets Agnes’s eyes and purrs, “Heya, hon.”

She’s not talking to Agnes. She’s talking to Wanda. If Wanda had a body of her own, she would shudder.

“Wanda, hon, I—” Agnes shuts the door quickly, locking it behind her, and pulls her blinds and curtains closed. She takes a deep breath in. “Could you – could you let me know next time you’re coming, hon? People don’t….” She raises her hand, pats her hair, and forces herself to try again. “People don’t—”

“I’m not here for other people, precious,” Agatha continues to purr. “I’m here for you.” She tosses the apple into the nearest trash bin, flows from the stool, and walks forward in an easy enough motion that Wanda is certain she isn’t touching the floor, is just hovering above it so that she can glide. Her hand raises to trace the shape of Agnes’s face as she searches her eyes. “How have you been taking care of my—”

Agnes crosses the admittedly small distance between them and kisses her.

Wanda screams except that she cannot scream and she pounds the walls of everything around her except she doesn’t have hands and there aren’t any walls.

She can’t control Agnes – and she hates this, hates that she can feel Agnes kissing who she thinks is her but is actually Agatha – hates this entire scenario, actually, in ways that words cannot describe – and hates that even though Agatha knows exactly is going on, even though Agatha’s eyes widen in surprise, she doesn’t stop.

…she will not think about whether or not she likes it because she absolutely does not.

(It’s harder to not think about whether she would like it if—)

Agatha pulls away with a little hum, one corner of her lips quirking ever so slightly upward, and Wanda feels the slightest trace of Agatha’s mind against her own before she pulls away. She brushes a thumb along the corner of Agnes’s lips as her head tilts ever so slightly to one side, in an uncanny mimicry of Wanda’s. A glint of scarlet flashes through her eyes and then disappears. “Now, hon, that’s not like you,” she murmurs, brushing Agnes’s hair back and tucking it behind one ear, fingertips flashing scarlet like her eyes but never to the point where it touches Agnes’s skin. “What’s going on in that naughty little head of yours?”

Wanda flinches, if she could be said to flinch.

Agnes curves into Agatha’s touch. Then her eyes narrow, and she glances up. “Wanda, hon, you don’t sound like yourself.” She meets who she thinks is Wanda’s eyes and searches them. “You sound like…like—”

Before she can finish, Agatha kisses her back.

It’s enough for Wanda to scream out in anger and growing horror, particularly feeling Agnes giving herself over—

Then something snaps.

She blinks.

Wanda blinks.

She bends her finger, focuses on that sensation, on that feeling, on being able to control it, instead of on Agatha, who is still kissing her with her own mouth, thank you very much, and then, finally, slaps her.

For a moment, Agatha doesn’t move. She just stands there, one hand on Wanda’s throat, and then pulls back, grinning. “Wondered when you’d wake up, buttercup.” She pats Wanda’s cheek twice and steps back, turns away from her. “Didn’t think it would take you that long, but you must have really enjoyed—”

Wanda tunes her out, holds her hands – Agatha’s hands; why isn’t she back in her body yet – out and blasts.

Nothing happens.

Agatha doesn’t turn back to her, just chuckles. “Oh, sweetheart. It is going to take a lot more than that if you want access to normal witchcraft.”

#bandit fic #wundagore punishment with wanda and agatha #wanda maximoff #scarlet witch #agatha harkness #agnes bohner #wandavision #mcu #wandagatha #harximoff #wagatha #wanda maximoff x agatha harkness #agatha harkness x wanda maximoff #wandagatha week 2023 #chapter three

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