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When she opens her eyes, she assumes she’s dead.
And, she thinks, it wouldn’t be a bad thing if she was. Vision was dead. Her children might as well be dead, only alive in another universe that wasn’t hers and she knew now could never fully be hers. Everyone who she used to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with in solidarity wanted her dead, after everything she’d done.
But, Wanda realizes as she opens her eyes more fully, she’s not dead. She can’t be dead, because she’s not buried under the pile of rubble that she knew rained down on her after she made the decision to destroy all the Darkholds. Instead, she’s lying on her stomach on wet grass, cool wind skirting over her face and hands and sending goosebumps up along her skin.
“Hey,” calls out a voice from somewhere behind her as she struggles to get her bearings. “You okay?”
Wanda stiffens, her entire body seizing as if she’s been shot. She forces herself to sit up even though everything hurts, even though she knows she looks like a disheveled mess with her hair falling in her face and sweat pooling at the crevices of her skin.
But she knows that voice. She’s known it for years.
She just thought she’d never hear it again.
Wanda turns, blinking in the bright sun. “Natasha?”
“Wanda?”
Natasha’s face folds into an expression of confusion and surprise and she steps closer, bending down to offer her hand. Not knowing what else to do, Wanda grasps it, noticing how her friend’s skin feels tangible, warm and solid. If this was some sort of dream or hallucination or even a hex that she’d unknowingly caused, it sure as hell felt like it was real.
“I — I don’t —” Wanda stops, looking up. The last time she had seen Natasha was on a battlefield in Wakanda; she was firm and hardened by fighting and determination and wore short blonde hair that accompanied a body covered in dirt and blood. This Natasha — whatever Natasha it was, if it wasn’t the one she left on that battlefield before she turned to dust, and how could it be? — seems softer, in both appearance and demeanor. Her long hair is a gentle ombre blend of red and blonde, twisted in a thin braid that falls over her right shoulder and her green khaki jacket that she’s wearing over a thin pink flannel shirt.
“Where am I?”
Natasha’s forehead creases before evening out. “New York. Well, Central Park, to be exact.”
“Central Park.”
Wanda glances around. She’s been to Central Park a handful of times and knows it well, but this only looks like Central Park on some level: the tall buildings rising out of the otherwise lush landscape, tourists and bikers lazily crawling their way along the pavement and grass. The buildings don’t look the way they do in New York; they’re lopsided and jagged and less stoic, and there’s far less greenery than Wanda knows she should be seeing. She closes her eyes.
A different Central Park. A different universe.
Which probably, definitely, means a different Natasha.
“Wanda.” Natasha’s voice is laced with concern and sounds hollow in the silence, even with the background noise of children and adults who are playing and walking near her. “Are you okay?”
Natasha using her name is enough for Wanda to know that even if there are no Avengers here, even if this is a different Natasha, this Natasha at least knows her. She knows her enough to recognize her and be concerned for her; it’s a small comfort, but it’s still a comfort that she’s clinging to until she figures out what the hell is going on.
“Okay, I, uh…” She stands fully, only now noticing that instead of her Scarlet Witch uniform she’s dressed in her variant’s clothes — jeans and a long white henley shirt that look dirty but are otherwise devoid of any of the blood she knows she inflicted on herself. “I know this sounds weird but I’m not from here. I mean, I’m not —”
“Another universe,” Natasha interrupts, her eyes trailing over Wanda’s body as if she’s taking in every freckle and hair strand, trying to see for herself if she’s telling the truth. She lets out a long breath. “So there really are multiverses.”
Wanda nods, unsure of what to say back. Natasha shoves her hands into the pocket of her jacket and shakes her head slowly.
“I never…Bruce talked about this kind of thing, but…”
“But?”
Natasha shrugs, looking up, as if she’s realized she’s been talking to herself. “But, I always thought…well…if anyone was going to fall out of the sky from another universe…” She trails off and then clears her throat, her voice becoming firm again. “Nevermind. I’m glad you’re here.”
Something about the way her voice wavers on the word anyone makes Wanda uneasy, but she shoves it to the back of her mind. There were other things she needed to figure out before she dove into the mind and relationships of this universe’s Natasha Romanoff.
“I don’t know why I’m here, though.”
“Well,” Natasha responds, folding her arms across her chest as if someone from another universe landing directly in her path in the middle of Central Park is something that happens every week, “what’s the last thing you remember?”
Wanda looks down at the ground and swallows hard as memories come rushing back — the pain, the screaming, the hopelessness. The emotional trauma of watching the two people she loved more than anything in the world look at her like they never wanted her to touch them again.
“I was…I made a decision. I was hurting people and I made the decision to stop,” she says, trying to choose her words carefully. “I suppose it’s possible that while I was doing that, I opened a portal for myself without knowing it. It was…the things I was doing, I wasn’t me. I couldn’t see a way out. So I chose sacrifice.”
Natasha smiles sadly. “Well, I know a little bit about sacrifice,” she says, reaching for Wanda’s hand and squeezing it gently. “Since you’re here, do you want to go and catch up?”
Wanda squeezes her hand back and nods, trying to keep the tears in the corner of her eyes at bay, and even if there’s a part of her mind that tells her she should be more careful, she can’t stop the words from coming out of her mouth.
“I think I’d like that.”
***
Natasha takes Wanda to a bustling coffee shop in SoHo. She recognizes the place as somewhere she once visited during her time in New York when she was living at Avengers Compound and taking weekend trips to the city to try to acclimate to a normalcy she once thought was impossible as both an Avenger and someone with powers they couldn’t control.
“So where am I, in this world?” Wanda asks as she slides into an open seat, shaking out her hair. Natasha hands her a menu and shrugs.
“I don’t know,” she answers methodically. “You disappeared after Thanos was destroyed and the world came back after five years. No one heard from you or knew where you were. We tried to search for you, for a little while. But…” She gives Wanda a tight smile. “It was clear you didn’t want to be found. You still don’t. And as someone who spent their years hiding when I didn’t want to be found, I knew better than to keep looking.”
Wanda bites down hard on her bottom lip. Natasha’s words, while slightly helpful, still don’t give her any insight into how similar this universe is from her own — whether or not she's created a Westview, if Agatha is alive, if Vision is still alive or if he's dead in every other universe like he's supposed to be, if her children are here. But at least she can confirm that some of the events that led up to the past few months were similar, which feels like a bit of a relief.
“Lucky me,” Wanda replies dryly as a woman with long blonde hair approaches the table. Wanda scans the offerings quickly and orders a cappuccino while Natasha orders a black coffee, and Wanda tries not to think about how weird everything feels.
She doesn’t even know if she should bring up the fact that in her own universe, Natasha was dead.
But Wanda knows enough about multiverses, now. She knows that even if the person in each universe had a different path that led them to where they are, even if their professions or relationships were different, they always carried around a small piece of themselves that bound them to their counterparts. This might not be the Natasha she knew, but there should still be enough of the Natasha she did know hidden somewhere inside.
And if Wanda was right, the part of Natasha that was so similar and steadfast across all universes started with one person.
“What happened?” she finds herself asking. “With Thanos? With the Avengers?” She parcels out each word carefully, nonchalantly, testing each key phrase and trying to find where the recognition lands. Natasha leans forward on the table, carefully putting her hands against the cold tile.
“I assume you have a similar story,” she starts, looking down. “We knew the only way to get the Infinity Stones back and reverse what had happened was by time traveling to retrieve them all over again. Tony and Bruce built a device that let us do that. We got the stones, and we defeated Thanos…but some of us didn’t make it back.”
The moment Natasha says the words, Wanda knows why she had felt like something was off during their earlier conversation. She feels like she knew the moment Natasha started talking, but she didn’t want to believe it or accept it, because even if this was only one universe out of dozens, it felt too heavy to consider.
In this universe, it wasn’t Natasha who had sacrificed herself for the soul stone.
“It is a similar story,” Wanda says quietly, after a long pause and after she’s sure she can talk without her voice breaking. “But different, in my world.” She doesn’t continue but Natasha seems to understand what she means because she takes her hands off the table and folds them in her lap, the very definition of holding herself together.
“I figured,” she says, her voice thick with emotion. “I wanted it to be me. It was supposed to be me. I suppose in some timeline out there, it was me and I got my wish of being the one who let him live.”
Wanda swallows down a lump of pain, shifting in her seat to distract herself from the tears she can feel building up behind her eyes. Her shoulder tingles with Clint’s phantom touch and she remembers the way he’d hugged her so closely and so warmly after Tony’s funeral, a show of vulnerability she would never let anyone else see besides Pietro and Vision.
“Do you ever think about it? Trying to find him somewhere else?”
Natasha laughs quietly. “I have,” she admits as the waitress returns, placing two cups of coffee in front of them. Natasha instantly curls her fingers around the porcelain mug, despite the fact steam is rising steadily from the liquid inside. “Bruce was trying to figure out a way for me to travel to another world…I thought maybe there was a variant out there who was just like him, and I could take him back with me. Bring him back to Laura and the kids. But after all the time travel stuff…” She tucks a strand of loose hair behind her ear and sighs. “He told me he didn’t want to get involved in this again. Maybe it’s better that way,” she continues, her face taking on a wistful look. “I guess I just always thought that if it was me, he’d be trying so hard to change it, and I should do the same.”
“He knew he couldn’t change it,” Wanda says before she can stop herself, before she realizes she doesn’t know if that’s helpful for this Natasha to hear. “But it didn’t mean that he wasn’t grieving. He…he missed you so much.”
“Yeah, well.” Natasha huffs out another laugh, blowing ripples into the top of her coffee. “Barton never really did well with guilt or people leaving him. Comes with the territory of his past, I guess.”
“But even if you could have gone somewhere, even if it worked…you couldn’t have changed anything,” Wanda continues, something desperate clawing its way into her chest. “You couldn’t have just taken him. He was someone else’s you, he was someone else’s husband, it wasn’t — it wouldn’t have been right.”
Natasha nods and then takes a deep breath, picking up her coffee. “Your turn,” she instructs after a beat of silence, not bothering to acknowledge Wanda’s words. “You said you were trying to sacrifice yourself. Why?”
It’s Wanda’s turn to look at the table, to fold her hands in her lap like she’s the picture of stoic. “Are you familiar with the Darkhold?”
Natasha furrows her brow and shakes her head, her ombre braid flitting back and forth slightly in the breeze of the coffee shop’s air conditioning. “I don’t think so. What is it?”
“It’s a book,” Wanda responds. “A powerful, dangerous book of magic. If you know how to use it, you can perform some of the most dangerous spells…you can do incredible, mind-bending things. But using it comes with a price.” She feels her fingers tremble against her legs and looks down, thinking if she stares at them long enough, she can see remnants of stained black. “I had a hard time after Thanos. I lost Vision…I lost everything. But using magic, I was able to get everything back. Almost everything,” she corrects, feeling her voice waver despite her best efforts.
Natasha raises an eyebrow. “Almost everything?”
Wanda takes her hands from her lap and moves them to the table, picking up her own coffee cup and taking a sip. “I gave myself a home — a husband, a family, a community. When it fell apart, when I stopped my magic, I lost most of that. My children didn’t exist — not in this universe. But I knew they existed in another one. I wanted to find them, and that involved taking powers from a young girl who didn’t deserve — she didn’t deserve to be caused this much pain,” Wanda continues, forcing herself to keep her tears at bay. She stops to collect herself, taking small, deep breaths as Tommy and Billy’s faces flash across her mind, their terrified eyes searing into her soul and imprinting on her heart. “In the end, all I succeeded in doing was making everyone angry at me. I found my children, but they could barely look at me because I had become so corrupted.” She clenches her teeth together, feeling herself vibrate with both anger and sadness.
“I’m not a bad person.”
Natasha scoffs. “No one said you were.”
“You were thinking it. I know you were. Everyone is, even if they don’t know me. But they know the Scarlet Witch. I’m a monster, not a mother.”
Natasha reaches over the table, putting her hand gently on top of Wanda’s palm and letting it rest on her skin. “I once told myself the same thing,” she says quietly, as if the confession is too sacred to be said out loud. Wanda looks up, her own brow furrowing.
“You — you had kids?”
Natasha smiles knowingly. “In a way,” she says cryptically and the realization hits Wanda like the same cascade of rocks that she tried to use to bury herself alive on Mount Wundagore. For as long as she’d known Clint, for as much as he’d let her into his life by letting her get to know his children and his wife and his home, he’d never mentioned how close Natasha was to his family. He’d never let on any hint that she was anything more than someone who visited with him once in awhile, the same way she did.
But Wanda hadn’t been stupid enough to know that you didn’t keep secrets without trusting someone deeply in this line of work, and she always knew who Clint trusted more than anyone else on this earth.
Any earth.
“Barton’s kids.”
Natasha presses her lips together and smiles. “Clint brought me home when I was just starting at SHIELD,” she says. “They loved me right away — they wanted to hug me, play with me, they wanted me to read them stories and take them swimming and change their diapers. I loved — love — them like they’re my own. I didn’t always, though. And it took me so long to let myself feel like I was someone they deserved to love like that.”
“Because of the Red Room,” Wanda says, remembering the conversations — though they were far and few between — that they had both had together when Natasha was training her.
Natasha’s lips fall back into a thin, straight line. “The things I did. The things I saw — I was a monster. I saw myself as a monster. I know it was what I had been trained to do and I didn’t know anything different, but anytime I touched them, all I could think of were the terrible things I’d done. I couldn’t understand why they would think of me as a mother. I felt like they had to be able to see all my flaws.”
“Children see things differently,” Wanda offers, because if she can offer anything, it feels like she can give this much. “They forgive more easily. They have different values. We can be forgiven more easily.”
“Can we?” Natasha muses, leaning her elbows on the table and looking sad. “I know they love me. They always have. Five years of them being snapped away didn’t change that. But every morning, I wake up and make breakfast and wonder if they regret that I’m here and their dad isn’t. Love is…it is for children, isn’t it?” She picks up her coffee again, taking a deep sip of caffeine, and Wanda watches her drink in silence. She knows that she could have never imagined that the best way for her to start to heal would be to sit in a coffee shop in another universe and talk to a friend who she thought she’d ever see alive again — and yet, she knows it’s exactly what she needs.
“I wonder the same thing,” she replies. “My children — I apologized to them, but I don’t know if they’ll know if they’ll close their eyes and ever see a mom who isn’t trying to hurt them. It’s why I had to destroy the Darkhold. All of the Darkholds, in all the universes. And why I tried to destroy myself too, but…I guess no one was listening.”
“The universe does have a way of giving us second chances,” Natasha agrees ominously, and Wanda doesn’t have to ask her what she’s referring to. She downs the rest of her cappuccino, feeling the heated milk slide down her throat like fire.
“I just…I don’t think I deserve a second chance. I’ve already had one. After Ultron. And I had another, when I came back from Thanos.”
“Well, join the club,” Natasha says, gesturing to the coffee shop around them. “I’ve already had one too. I’ve had a lot. And every time, I thought I didn’t deserve one. Then Clint went and jumped off a cliff to retrieve a stupid glowing stone, just so I could have the ultimate second chance…” She breaks off to laugh, shoving a hand across her mouth to stop herself from breaking completely. “Apparently I haven’t been able to walk away from that.”
“Yeah.”
Wanda knows Natasha understands, and she knows Natasha is right. Second chances weren’t always a given, but it didn’t mean that once you had one, you couldn’t keep starting over. And if anyone knew that, it was Natasha, who had probably started over more times than Wanda could count.
But she still has no idea how she ended up here — she has no idea why she’s not dead, what she might’ve thought of or done to herself that allowed her this second, third, or fourth chance — a chance to have this kind of conversation, to right her wrongs, to forgive herself and everyone around her.
“What do I do?”
Natasha tilts her head to the side, looking surprised at Wanda’s question. “I don’t know,” she admits. “You could go back, if you know how to get back. Unfortunately, I can’t help you there, which I think you know. Or…or you could stay.”
“Stay,” Wanda repeats, looking around the otherwise bustling coffee shop. “I thought we weren’t supposed to stay in other universes.”
“Well, maybe you're supposed to stay in this one,” Natasha suggests easily as Wanda brings her fingers to her hair, pulling at the long strands that are falling in her face.
“I don’t understand.”
Natasha leans forward on the table, putting her chin in her hands. “I told you that we haven’t seen you since Thanos brought everyone back from the blip,” she reminds her. “No one even knows where you are. Maybe that was for a reason. Maybe you weren’t supposed to come back because this was supposed to happen. Maybe you were supposed to find yourself here.”
“Serendipity?” Wanda shakes her head. “I don’t know if this universe works like that.”
“Well, from where I’m sitting, I don’t think it matters how the universe works,” Natasha answers. “I think what matters is that you could use some healing.”
“So could you,” Wanda points out. Natasha leans back in her chair, giving Wanda a skeptical look before half her mouth turns up in a small smile.
“We never did this that much in our other universe, did we?” Natasha asks, inclining her head. “Talked like this?”
Wanda shakes her head and nods towards her. “No. We never…you trained me for a little while, and then the world went to shit, as Clint would say. We never really got a chance to talk a lot.” She pauses. “I wish we did."
“Serendipity,” Natasha echoes, giving Wanda a knowing look. When she doesn’t respond, Natasha clears her throat and folds her arms across her chest.
“There’s an extra room at the farm,” she says after a beat. “Laura keeps it for guests but as you can imagine, we don’t get many. I’m sure she’d be fine with you staying for awhile. If…if you wanted.”
If you wanted. Wanda considers Natasha’s words, knowing there’s so much more to them than just a simple yes or no. It was the comfort she always craved, the things she could’t find since giving up Vision and Westview and Tommy and Billy — a home, people who cared about her and who genuinely understood her and children she could try to love again.
But this also wasn’t Natasha. This wasn’t Laura, and these weren't the children she’d gotten to know so well over video chats and long phone calls for so many years. And yet...
If Natasha knew her, that meant they would know her. They would accept her. They would give her a way to start over even if Wanda would, like Natasha once upon a time, spend too many days thinking about how she didn’t deserve to be loved in this specific way.
“Would they be happy to see me?” Wanda asks softly, almost tentatively.
Natasha smiles widely. “Yes,” she says. “I really think they would.”
Wanda smiles back, feeling the tears she’s held at bay for so long finally start to leak down the side of her face.
“Okay,” she decides, reaching across the table and taking Natasha’s hand again. She nods, and for the first time in forever, when she takes a deep breath, she realizes it doesn’t hurt to breathe.
“I’d like that.”