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It’s the one thing that nobody ever warns you about. The tremendous, overwhelming feelings of everything around you caving in, burning you in this enormous pressure that you would never have been able to fathom; and all the while the rest of the world continues to move forward. Life, she had realised, hadn’t stopped just because her own world had stopped spinning. And by the time it had happened for the third time, she had hoped that she had been used to it. Somehow, it had felt worse.
First, it had been her parents. In her later years, Wanda had wondered why she always listed them mentally at the bottom of her pile but she had quickly realised that it was something that all children had to face at sometimes. The loss of a parent was inevitable. Life had it’s logical order, and children losing their parents was what was supposed to happen, wasn’t it? Sure enough it had been too soon, leaving both her and Pietro without parents, spiralling them onto the path of darkness that would go on to consuming their lives, but it wasn’t something that she had never expected to feel.
Pietro had been next. The grief that had followed the loss of her brother had been all consuming. For years it had just been the two of them, and they had gone through everything. They had shared the anger and the wanting to avenge their parents death. Later, throughout their time at HYDRA, they had experienced a world they had never thought possible. Their powers had been born of that, and they had worked as a team - and no matter what, at the end of the day, she always had her twin. The other half of her who would always be there.
She had read many books over the years, and most of the plots told of rivalry between siblings and yet she and Pietro had never experienced that. They shared each other’s highs and lows, they had celebrated together and had always consoled each other.
And after Ultron, when she had felt most alone, she had met him.
Vision.
The synthezoid she had fallen head over heels for.
Others had said that she had shifted her grief to Vision. That she hadn’t given herself enough time to mourn the loss of her brother before she had thrown herself into a relationship with the android. Which may have partly been true, but while everyone avoided her - she had a list of destruction as long as a piece of string that caused others to fear her… and while everyone cowered, or avoided her or dished out pleasantries as though they were pieces of candy so that they could get onto her good side (which would never have worked), Vision didn’t shy away from her.
He would listen. He would sit in silence with her as she stared at the crown mouldings of her room in the compound. Her eyes would remain fixed on the small web that had formed in the corner of the room by some invisible spider she had never actually seen weaving it, and Vision would sit with her. His presence was a comfort. She wasn’t physically alone, and she didn’t know where it had happened, but somewhere too, she had realised that she wasn’t emotionally alone either.
Their conversations had started with small gestures. Meals brought to her when she hadn’t appeared out of her room for days that turned into weeks. Small gifts that would be left by her door with a note telling her that he had hoped it would make her smile. She could even swear that even in the darkest of nights, she would sometimes hear him phasing through her wall - presumably to check on her, but she would never lift her head to check because she feared that if she did just that, she would find out that he wasn’t actually there.
Her mind could be a cruel place sometimes, and at first, before Vision, she had often imagined that she could hear Pietro’s voice calling to her, or sometimes when she would put a Sitcom on, she would be sure that she could smell the faint scent of her mother’s perfume, or the soft hum of her father’s laugh.
She didn’t want to realise that she was imagining Vision there too.
He had become her comfort.
They had settled into a routine after a while. Soft touches, lingering glances, quiet jokes to break up the silence - and then, Wanda began to feel … not so much as herself. The true Wanda had perished the moment the bomb had destroyed her life in Sokovia. But this new version of Wanda - powers and all, began to be a nice new adjustment. A fresh start. Wanda Maximoff, the witch that everyone had feared, had become a person who had begun to feel comfortable with herself and all thanks to Vision, who had taught her that it wasn’t criminal to hate who she was.
He had told her that the very things that hold her down would begin to lift her up.
What Vision hadn’t realised was that it had been him all along. He had been the one to find the joy in a new day, in a quiet sunrise, in the aroma of a freshly brewed cup of coffee - and that none of that had to come along with a side of guilt. She had begun to realise that her family would be proud of her for everything she had achieved and for the woman she had become, and while that didn’t stop the guilt, she began to learn to live alongside it in some kind of weird harmony.
Those were the days when breathing felt lighter, and the air felt warmer, and the feeling of blood rushing through her body wasn’t that of anxiety or pain, it was because of love.
Love.
A feeling she had never thought she would be able to experience again. Vision had brought the light back into her life with his stupidly adorable laugh and his wise words of wisdom, and the soft touch of his fingers against her skin while she slept, nestled against the breadth of his chest. At the beginning, she had felt bad about sleeping for long hours, curled up against him while he lay awake but there was something in his choice of laying with her. He chose to be there. He chose Wanda.
Out of everyone on the planet, Vision chose her, and suddenly, Wanda felt as though he had simultaneously brought her back to life. It was like all of those stupid love songs sing about - the birds in the trees, the stars in the sky. As if the world had fallen into technicolour after she had lived within the darkness for so long.
Yellow had become her favourite colour. It represented the mind stone and the connection the two of them shared. Yellow was the colour of the sun, it was the colour of hope and positivity. It was the colour of the roses Vision had brought for her on their first date back in Scotland. It was the colour of the ducklings they had watched swim across the lake, trailing behind their mother on the crisp, wintery morning. It was the colour of their synchronisation, of their souls uniting and of their love.
But then, years later, it had become the colour Wanda could no longer bear to see.
There were no more yellow roses. There were no more yellow ribbons tied around boxes of Chocolates Vision would return home with after a long day, leading Wanda to question when he had gone to Belgium to pick them up for her, and for Vision to give her that knowing smirk that would tell her not to ask questions as his hand would caress her face gently.
“I’d go to the ends of the earth for you, darling,” he would tell her, causing Wanda to fall into his embrace.
But her world had gone back to grey after Vision. There was no sense to anything anymore. He had brought colour into the world and his departure had taken it with him. The coffee tasted bland and she had found herself living in a cabin in the middle of a woods where there was no birdsong.
A roaring fire crackled loudly from the fireplace, the only warmth in the cabin. She didn’t deserve the warmth, the comfort, the heat. Everything was bleak, and once again, Wanda was alone. The world moved forward, citizens moved on with their lives but for the witch there was nothing. She was the harbinger of death. Everyone who had ever loved her had died.
Atropa Belladonna and Cicuta Maculata sprung from the earth around the cabin. She hadn’t noticed them until the snow had melted and given birth to the violet and white of the plants - both of which she would learn were the deadliest plants to humankind. A kind of irony, a joke bestowed upon her by Mother Nature. It seemed fitting; water hemlock and deadly nightshade were the only two things growing in the land around the home she had made herself in isolation.
Even the planet knew that she was deadly.