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Her room is the same as it always has been.
She doesn’t know how she remembers that, but she does.
It reminds her, vaguely, of her time in the Avengers compound, when she’d only been able to pick and choose from what was offered her to decorate her room. The others had brought things from their previous homes, but Wanda’s last home was – and still is – gone. They say, sometimes, to think about places where you used to live, to revisit them, to see if there are haunted, empty absences where they once stood, but Wanda doesn’t have to think about it. She was there when it collapsed. She’d wanted to collapse with it.
Vision had saved her, then, had swooped in like a fairytale prince and carried her like a bride up and out of wreckage that would soon be nothing more than that, nothing at all.
This time, when Wanda drew wreckage around her, there had been no one to save her.
And yet.
This isn’t quite a home, where she is now. She certainly wouldn’t call it that. Sokovia has been left abandoned in the eight years since Thanos took away half of everything; there might have been people struggling to rebuild it when they all disappeared, but with half of humanity gone, they’d lost the will to do it. They’d huddled together in places full of those same absences, those same hollow voids, and thought that at least together the broken pieces within them might be soothed by attaching to someone else. They’d struggled to survive. Rebuilding had been the last thing on their minds.
Not that Wanda had been there to live it. She’d heard about it later, understood why her attempts to rebuild Sokovia before her disappearance had been abandoned in her absence, and by the time they all returned, there were so few Sokovians left who wanted to rebuild that when the world began to piece itself back together, her little country had been abandoned. It looked too much like those theme parks left to be overrun, like a mall with vines dripping through broken glass, with plants bursting through cracked concrete.
Haunting.
Just like she was.
Perhaps it isn’t right to call where she lives a room. Really, it’s more like what must have been an old office in the back of what must have been a mall – she can only tell because there are indications of a food court a few rooms down, the water faded wrinkled and shredded posters with burgers or chicken or once a spotted cow. All cheap, bad food, but good because it was cheap. After her parents died, she and Pietro had survived on that kind of food. It was cheaper than normal groceries, and it wasn’t like they’d had a stove to cook anything on.
She’d learned, eventually, how to roast things over a fire, so they’d had a lot of roasted food. But fast food had been a nice break from eating the same roasted, fire spun ashen taste over and over and over. And by then…by then, it had become nostalgic.
Really, she should just be glad it hadn’t stunted her growth.
She should just be glad about a lot of things. She knows that. She holds to that. But it never quite sticks when compared to everything she’s lost. Someone, trying to make her feel better, would probably tell her she should just be glad that she’s alive.
She’d meant to die. She’s not particularly glad that she didn’t.
Wanda sits in her room that really should be an office again except that she’s used her chaos magic to craft it into the last real room that felt something like home; it doesn’t feel anything like Westview had, and although she believed – and still believes – that her family there had been real….
She just doesn’t have the strength to argue with anyone. Not that they’re looking for her.
The only thing in the Avengers compound that had felt really hers was the guitar. Sure, it sat to one side more often than not, but that had more to do with not wanting to disturb people with her playing at all hours – the jetlag resulting in her move to the states after living in Sokovia so long kept her sleep schedule not quite on par with anyone else’s, and her grief hadn’t helped with that either. That’s the thing about grief – it keeps you awake when you should be asleep, and it makes you sleepy when you should be awake. She’d just been fucked from the start.
She could have told them that.
In the wreckage, she’d found a beaten up old guitar. The strings were snapped, and it was missing most of a strap – there were fraying edges at the bottom and the top, where it still held tight to the pegs once holding it into place – but the body of it seemed mostly okay. Mostly. She’d dusted it off and taken it back to her office room, very carefully unwound the broken strings, stripped the strips of fabric from their pegs, and then stared at the body of the guitar. Eventually, she found a sticker in the back of the hollow, although she couldn’t read it. Most of it’s already been scratched off, but she could almost make out the black outline of a diamond.
Her breath caught in the back of her throat.
It took a few months, but eventually, she found strings. She’s never found a strap, but that was fine. She didn’t need one – doesn’t need one. If she ever wants a strap, she can just rip a few pieces of fabric and sew them together until they’re thick enough to hold the guitar against her. But sitting and playing? It’s unnecessary.
In her free time, which is always, Wanda picks up the guitar and idly begins to play. Sometimes she strums chords. Sometimes she plunks out one tune or other – usually a song her mother used to sing her to sleep, when she was much, much younger. Eventually, she catches herself humming the theme songs from her shows in Westview, hates herself for remembering them, hates how danged catchy they are, and begins to pick them out, note by note, instead.
And, eventually, although she doesn’t know why she’s doing it, she finds the notes for Agatha’s, too.
The thing about becoming a villain – and Wanda has to be honest with herself eventually: she wasn’t just a monster; she was a villain – is that the guilt never really goes away. Every now and again, she glances down at her hands, at her ink-stained fingers, and thinks the black she sees is really just dried blood. Sometimes there’s a scarlet tint to it. It’s the worst part of playing guitar now – that glancing over to her fingers and seeing that ashen dark burn to them, seeing the gray tint that the strings leave on her right thumbnail and having it look light against the rest of her skin instead of dark.
Sometimes, when she sings, she screams.
It’s not like there’s anyone out here to hear her.
Sometimes, the ache in her is so loud that she can’t scream. It’s just tears on her cheeks and mouthing lyrics that probably no one knows anymore and her voice so raspy and rasping that she can’t get words out around how much it aches. Sometimes, she wipes the tears away and the snot from her running nose and goes back to playing as if nothing’s happened, nothing’s changed at all. Sometimes, she doesn’t wipe anything, and then her eyes start pricking from the tears in them, and then even when she’s done with the whole crying thing, her eyes are watering and stinging and she can’t see (not that she really needs to see to play anymore). Sometimes, she puts the guitar to one side and doesn’t look at it for days after. Or she looks at it, but she doesn’t play it.
When she’s at her worst, she finds her fingers picking through Agatha’s song.
It’s soothing.
Wanda considers – exactly once – how many people she’s killed.
Not just at Kamar-Taj, not just the probable friends of that other version of herself in that other universe, but the one’s she’s killed by accident – all those people in the building in Lagos, the accidental bystanders who must have been at their windows staring down at everything, must have seen the bomb be lifted up into the air by her magic, and then spent their last few seconds panicking as it drew ever closer to them.
(Steve told her that if she hadn’t moved the bomb, there would have been bystanders killed in the street. It didn’t make her feel better. Still doesn’t now.
Those bystanders wouldn’t have been her fault.
(She tells herself that, but the truth is – if she hadn’t moved the bomb, she would have blamed herself for their deaths, too. For not trying to save them, for not trying to move the bomb. Either way, their deaths would have been her fault, and she would only have blamed herself. The world, perhaps, wouldn’t have blamed her, though.))
She considers the aliens she’s murdered for trying to murder her. Considers that she must have looked like them to those people in the other universe. Considers that those other people had initially only tried to stop her without killing her because that Wanda might not have deserved to be killed. Considers, too, that eventually that hadn’t mattered to them, either. That they shot to kill.
That Wanda, dead, would have left her boys behind.
It doesn’t matter. She’d killed them without mercy, regardless whether they’d shown any to her or not.
Then, too, she has to consider—
She hadn’t been able to see her boys disintegrate in front of her.
She hadn’t wanted to see Vis do the same, but he had insisted just because he wanted to see her.
(Was that really him, or just what she wanted of him?)
He’d insisted on it the first time, too, but not for any such romantic reasons. He hadn’t wanted to die. He hadn’t—
She only considers this once because she can’t hold it in if she considers it more than this.
Sometimes, playing guitar, she considers how Agatha must have felt, murdering all of those people when she was a teenager.
She gags. Pushes the thought from her mind. Absolutely refuses to consider it again.
And yet, the thought worms its way back in every now and again, usually when she finds her fingers idly running through the notes she now knows from memory, out of habit, out of being played one too many times when she doesn’t want to play it at all.
That song is just as fucking insidious as the witch herself is.
Was.
….
IS.
Agatha must have felt like this.
At some point.
Probably.
Must have.
….
No, Agatha was the woman who literally pulled her children down the street on magical nooses tight enough to choke them just to get Wanda to attack her. It doesn’t matter if she ever felt like this or not. Absolutely does not matter. She’d decided killing people was okay. Justifiable, even!
….
It’s not like Wanda ever felt bad about killing the aliens. Not before all of this. And if her children’s fear hadn’t opened her eyes to who – to what – she was becoming, would she ever have felt bad about…about any of that? About the people she slaughtered?
She’d tried to kill the better version of herself.
Ironic, actually.
It isn’t easy to go through the wreckage of the old mall and pick through things. She takes days, weeks, months clearing away debris. Mostly by hand – she doesn’t trust herself to use her magic anymore. There’s something nice about using her hands anyway, not that it’s better than using her magic would be, not that it wouldn’t be easier to use her magic, and maybe she would, if she were helping other people, but she’s the only one out here, and her hands are getting dirtied, and when her hands are dirtied, they don’t look bloodied, and when she scratches and nicks her skin, the blood on it is her own and not something imaginary.
She wonders, idly, if she can get tetanus after all of those shots she’d been given when—
It was a little like being an adopted pet, when she joined the Avengers, with all the check-ups and making sure she didn’t have some sort of disease and that all of her shots were up-to-date, like she’d had any records of that to bring with her. They told her Bruce would have taken care of it, if he were there, and sometimes, it felt like they were waiting for him to get back to take care of it with how long it took for them to address what they thought were some of the issues, but….
Vis took over his lab. He’d had a good bedside manner, but he hadn’t understood, really. He hadn’t needed to get shots. He’d never felt multiple going into his fragile human skin at once because he...didn’t have fragile human skin. She’d sat in the chair and talked with him as though that would somehow make her forget that he was about to stick one into her skin, and then he’d stick her when he thought she was distracted, and she would—
She probably can’t get tetanus. Those are, what, one every ten years? Even factoring in the Snap, it hasn’t been that long. Or maybe it has. Maybe she should be concerned. Do tetanus shots factor in a five year lack of existence? Probably not. The more important question is does she care?
Honestly?
If she hasn’t been killed by worser things, it would be kind of hilarious if she was downed by a rusty nail.
Her thumb throbs when she tries to strum.
The next day, she actively searches for gloves.
The gloves she finds are small and black and floral and make her think of Dottie and her roses. Dottie who wasn’t – isn’t – Dottie. She should think of her as Sarah.
But it isn’t Sarah the gloves remind her of. It’s Dottie. The woman she’d forced her to be.
Which was worse? Actively, intentionally slaughtering people or forcing innocent bystanders to play out fantasies—
She can’t think like this and stay sane.
It’s all she can think about.
Sometimes, fiddling with the guitar with sore arms and tired hands, Wanda wonders what it would be like, to let someone else take control, to let someone else decide what would make her happy, to let someone else make all of those decisions for her. The idea is…nice. Comforting.
The actuality of it would be hell, though. She knows better than to think she actually wants that. It’s what being locked up had felt like. Worse, maybe. Patronizing. Besides, the people in Westview hadn’t seemed to enjoy—
Agatha probably isn’t—
She catches herself idly strumming her song and cuts herself off.
There are better things to play.
She wonders, once, if America thinks about her the same way she thinks about Agatha.
It’s not a pleasant thought.
She shoves it down deep into the lake of her mind and doesn’t drag it back up again.
Her office room begins to slowly fill with little things she picks up as she sorts through the wreckage. The guitar gets a corner of its own, but the gloves hang from a peg when she isn’t using them, and an assorted selection of rocks – some smooth, most not – that she’d decided were pretty when she first found them sit on a ledge that might once have held a window a long time ago. She still hasn’t found a usable mattress, but to be honest, she isn’t really looking.
On occasion, she runs her fingers along the rocks and thinks Billy would love this one or Tommy would call this one a fossil. She isn’t to the place where she can smile about it, but when she plays her guitar later, she doesn’t scream.
But she doesn’t sing either.
She doesn’t want to go back to Westview.
She never wants to go back to Westview again.
She goes back to Westview.
It’s…odd, years later, to go back, and it’s odder still to be in a living, breathing town with stores and restaurants and houses after spending so many years in a lakeside cabin by herself and then more time alone in the wreckage of an abandoned country. She breathes in the air, and she breathes in life, and she finds that it all stings a little too much.
She leaves almost as soon as she lands.
She can’t get that stupid fucking song out of her head.
Pity, pity, pity, pity—
She will not throw the guitar.
It’s not the guitar’s fault.
She plunks out her own four note theme, hums it to herself, and tries to keep it in mind as she drifts off to sleep.
Westview doesn’t hate Agnes.
Maybe it wouldn’t hate her, either, if she were someone else. Someone who just looked like someone who once used to—
No.
It’s too much to hope.
She sits on the edge of the bed she’s crafted for herself, and she plays the song, and Agatha lifts her chin and says, I understand.
It doesn’t make her feel better.
It doesn’t make her feel anything at all.