Chapter Text
Mr. Davis looks uncomfortable, but nods slowly. “I’m sorry Wanda, she’s right, if you start making things glow, well, people are already pretty nervous. Will you be leaving before the storm hits?” He looks a little flustered. “This is all so last minute, it wasn’t even supposed to hit here, but apparently it veered last night, and now here we are!” He’s clearly trying to remain calm and cheerful, and Wanda appreciates the effort.
Wanda shakes her head. “We’re staying to help.” she says firmly. “I can shield the building from damage, and I think I can keep the power on if it goes out?” She says it in the form of a question, glancing over at Agatha, who nods slowly.
“That would be amazing. We have generators, but just in case, that would be so helpful.” Mr. Davis says, looking relieved. “The National Guard isn’t going to get here in time, so if there’s anything that needs doing that we can’t-” He cuts off, looking embarrassed to even be asking her to use her powers.
“I’m happy to help.” Wanda says with a soft smile.
She sees Olivia Proctor running toward them, delight crossing her face, and Wanda is getting ready to witness her next bizarre interaction with Agatha when the doors burst open.
A tall man stands with his hands braced on the heavy wooden doors, looking around the room with wild eyes.
“Doctor! Is there a doctor in here!” He shouts, desperation in his voice.
Wanda throws up her hands, ready to fend off the intruder, but Mr. Davis and Sarah Proctor seem to recognize him. Sarah turns and gets the attention of a harried woman carrying a clipboard, who hurries over.
“Jensen, what’s wrong, who’s been hurt?” Mr. Davis asks.
The man, Jensen, hurries to Mr. Davis. He doesn’t seem to notice Wanda at all. “It’s Abil, a tree fell and he’s trapped, he’s-” Jensen breaks off, “Doctor Madison, you have to come help, his foot-”
The sheer panic radiating off him is starting to make her own heart beat faster. She doesn’t need to reach out with her magic to feel it, his mind is so chaotic it’s like it’s reaching out to her . She winces, hoping nobody notices.
The woman Sarah Proctor waved over, Doctor Madison, shakes her head, her eyes rapidly switching between scanning the clipboard in her hands and looking all over the room, doing calculations in her head. “Jensen, I’m so sorry but most medical staff have already evacuated. There are only two of us here and Mr. Robertson is having a stroke. I think a few members of the fire marshall are here, you can try to find them.”
Jensen grabs Doctor Madison’s hands, knocking her clipboard to the floor with a loud clatter. “Please, Doctor, he needs help!” A few people around them stop what they’re doing to watch what’s going on, and Doctor Madison seems just as panicked as Jensen.
Wanda pictures Abil on the ground. His kind face as he told Wanda he understands her, how he misses Vision, like her, his patience while he shows her how to properly organize the books and fill out past due forms. Very few people have shown her the patience and understanding Abil has. And he’s out there somewhere, in the brewing storm.
Agatha is muttering something about there being better disaster response in the 19th century, but Wanda’s mind is made up.
“Where is he?” she asks, cutting through Jensen’s panicked tirade.
Mr. Davis, Sarah, Doctor Madison, Jensen, and Agatha all turn to look at her. All at once, all of them burst into their own objections:
“I don’t think that would be wise-”
“Are you kidding? The point of the town hall is to keep everyone here -”
“I don’t think so, sweet cheeks.”
Wanda shakes her head and locks eyes with Jensen, who seems not to have noticed she was standing there. “I can help. Take me to him.”
Jensen slowly nods, and releases Doctor Madison, who immediately darts off.
“Are you sure about this, Wanda?” Mr. Davis asks. At first, she thinks he’s questioning whether she is capable of this, of helping Abil in this way. They don’t understand, none of them do.
This is what her power is meant for. It yearns to make things better, to alter. Now, she can feel it rising up inside her, restless, urging her to move, to fix.
When she looks at Mr. Davis, she realizes he isn’t questioning her abilities at all. His brows are furrowed, and he is looking at her with concern. He’s not wary of her, he’s worried about her.
Wanda relaxes a little, and gives him a small smile. “Of course. We’ll be back soon. Before it gets too bad.”
Wanda is about to turn to Jensen when a strong hand grabs her arm. The glamour has covered up Wanda’s scaly mistake, so it is pale where it grips her sleeve.
Agatha’s stern blue eyes meet hers. “Don’t do this. You don’t know what you might do to him.”
Wanda pulls her arm out of Agatha’s grip. “No, I don’t. But I know exactly what will happen if I do nothing.”
Agatha rolls out her shoulders and schools away her frustration. She doesn’t look happy about it, but she says, “Fine. Lead the way, boyfriend,” she directs to Jensen.
He nods and leads them toward the doors of the town hall. Wanda wonders dimly why Agatha assumes Jensen is Abil’s boyfriend, or if she’s just teasing in this horribly inappropriate moment. Then Jensen breaks into a run. His panic is still coming off him in waves, and Wanda thinks if she hadn’t been training with Agatha to dull her psychic outreach, it might have been very painful for her. That’s why.
Jensen leads them sprinting down the streets of Westview. The air is moist, a light drizzle just beginning as thunder clouds darken the sky. If she remembers correctly, it’s only about four in the afternoon, but the streets are a heavy gray blue. The wind is strong now, trees rustling and groaning, leaves whipping down the road, caught in the gale. Thankfully, the wind is behind them as they turn down Liberty Street.
Somehow, a tree is already downed partway down the road. Its stump is still clinging to the ground, the back of a silver sedan crushed between it and the fallen trunk, its trunk and roof mostly caved in. With a jolt of horror, she sees movement inside, a dark shape behind the condensated driver's side window. But that isn’t the worst of it. One leg pokes out from the downed tree, and a foot is pinned to the ground by a branch. She can’t see the rest of him.
Wanda, Agatha, and Jensen make it to the car and Agatha bends double, catching her breath while Jensen calls out to Abil, “Abil, we’re here! I brought help! Can you hear me, baby?”
Jensen squeezes himself between the tree and the sedan, and his voice vanishes on the wind.
Wanda approaches the scene, and it really is horrible. It seems that Abil was trying to get out of the car and was caught on the way. His body is at an awkward angle, halfway sunk down in the driver’s seat. One foot is propped up in the narrow space between the sedan and the tree trunk, the other extended outward, pinned in place. A branch is pinning his foot to the ground. No, not just pinning it, Wanda realizes with a jolt of horror she would have thought years of violence and war would have drilled out of her. The branch has gone through Abil’s foot. Blood leaks feebly from the spot where it protrudes from his gray sneaker.
Wanda’s stomach lurches.
“Okay hot stuff,” Agatha wheezes behind her, “Time to get rid of the tree. Be careful. Don’t get rid of the thing keeping the blood inside.”
Wanda doesn’t look at her, just reaches out with her magic. “You think I don’t know that? Do you know how many people I’ve pulled out of collapsed buildings?”
She remembers the girl who lived in the apartment next door in Sokovia. When she and Pietro finally emerged from the rubble, they found her in the wreckage of the bathroom, a plumbing pipe through her little leg. They had tried to help.
The shape of the tree is clear in her mind and in her hands. It’s not alive anymore, just a thing. She pulls her magic around it, a shimmering red net covering it, save for a careful hole around the branch in Abil’s foot. Then she yanks her hands apart and it vanishes. There is the loud metal sound of the car suspension groaning back into place and Abil cries out. It’s the first Wanda has heard from him and she’s grateful.
His leg is shaking now that it’s not pinned down, and Jensen is quick to fall to the ground and pull it into his lap, murmuring comforting things all the while. He looks up at her, uncertain.
“You’re sure you can do this?” he says.
Wanda looks to Abil. His face is pale, and he’s sweating through his soft gray hoodie. Abil just closes his eyes and nods.
Agatha has knelt down beside Jensen, seemingly unperturbed. “Wanda, can you get his shoe off? You’re gonna need visibility for this.”
Jensen stares with unmasked horror, undoubtedly contemplating how they’re going to get the shoe off without removing the branch, but Wanda snaps her fingers and the shoe dissolves.
“Okay, pulling this out the non-magic way might cause more harm than good. You need to get every tiny piece of wood out of his body before you seal it back up,” Agatha says, studying the wound. “Get rid of it a little bit at a time.”
Wanda is too busy thinking about how in the world she’s going to find every single splinter of wood in Abil’s foot to say anything snarky back. She shakes herself, and kneels down opposite Jensen and Agatha.
“Are you okay with this, Abil?” Wanda asks.
Abil nods shakily. “J-just give me a countdown?” he whimpers.
Wanda glances at Jensen, who nods.
Then she focuses on the branch. It’s strange, sectioning off part of it in her mind. Her magic wants to wrap itself around the whole thing, do this quickly and impressively. Wanda takes a deep breath and shrinks her influence, focusing on one small chunk of the wood. She nods again, and Jensen counts down from three.
On one, she vanishes a tiny piece of the wood, no wider than her thumbnail. Abil gasps and cries out a little, but she was expecting a scream. Not knowing exactly what she’s looking for, she plunges her senses into the tiny bit of exposed wound, searching for the pieces of wood Agatha told her about. They truly are tiny, like hairs, microscopic. She imagines pulling them will be like pulling a thousand tiny splinters.
She nods at Jensen again, there’s another countdown, and then she pulls them.
Abil shrieks.
Wanda winces and opens her eyes, expecting Agatha to be glaring at her. Instead, she’s just focused, gripping the branch to make sure it doesn’t slip down further. A flash of curiosity has Wanda wondering what experience Agatha has with this kind of work.
“Don’t pull them. This isn’t like pulling splinters by hand, you don’t have to yank the flesh this way and that,” she says. Jensen winces. “Just make them disappear. Won’t hurt much less,” Agatha directs to Abil, “But won’t tear you up as badly.”
Abil doesn’t seem to have the energy to respond, he just takes in a long breath and lets it out.
Wanda takes Agatha’s advice as best as she can. It’s a few more fingernail-sized chunks of wood later that Wanda worries that a normal physical grip will jostle the branch. She reaches out with her magic, holding the branch suspended in place, and continues her work. It’s slow going. By the time the branch is looking more like two pieces than one, Abil has a piece of Jensen’s jacket in his mouth and the rain is coming down harder. The wind is making it difficult for her to concentrate.
“You need to start healing him!” Agatha shouts over the weather, “We’re running out of time!”
Wanda nods. “Abil, I’m going to take the rest out. There’s not much left.” She doesn’t wait for Abil to respond before she counts down: “Three! Two! One!” and yanks out what’s left of the branch. Then she focuses in as hard as she can on Abil’s flesh.
It’s difficult; all she sees is Abil’s pain, waves of it. The heavy red beat of it reaches out to her powers, and she latches onto that feeling as she remembers the first time she did this, slowly knitting together the flesh from the inside out. There’s bone this time, there’s marrow and tendons and nerves, there’s so much. Agatha is right about one thing: bodies are so much more complicated than inanimate objects. Without Agatha’s magic egging on her own, it’s easier to focus. But this time there are so many more variables.
She thinks about the day Sparky “died.” Agatha had asked her if she could bring back the dead. She knows why now. To a witch like Agatha, Wanda’s family must have been a horribly morbid mockery of life. Wanda had insisted she couldn’t do it, and she was right. But that night she had lain awake thinking, why not? Bodies are just as physical as anything else Wanda could control, why couldn’t she put one back together? It was ironic, considering “Vision” was asleep beside her at the time. But she had understood so little.
“Hey, Red, focus!” Agatha snaps, but it was too late. Her thoughts had wandered, and her magic responded.
Wanda stares down at Abil’s newly healed foot. There is a round pink scar where the branch had been, but it was mostly back to normal. Still, something is different.
Abil is pushing himself up, trying to stand, but Wanda’s arm reaches out to stop him. She lifts his foot, and there it is. Her heart sinks. The bottom of Abil’s foot is a dull, thick black. Not the same as Agatha’s iridescent snake scales, but a tender matte black that extends out to his toes, which are soft pads of the same stuff.
Lost in her thoughts about Sparky, she has given Abil a dog’s paw.
“Abil, I’m so sorry,” Wanda says, rising, her hands up. “I-I can fix it, I can-”
“Don’t,” Agatha murmurs, surprisingly soft.
Abil staggers to his feet, still shaky, but he doesn’t seem to be in any pain. Jensen slips an arm around his back and helps him stand, looking between Wanda and his boyfriend with confusion.
“What did you do?” Abil asks, but there’s no malice in it. Just curiosity and exhaustion.
“I think I- it’s not-”
“It’s not the same as it was, but it doesn’t have a hole in it anymore,” Agatha finishes for her, as if daring him to protest.
Abil lifts up his foot, leaning heavily on Jensen, and squints at it through the rain. “Huh,” he says, “I think maybe when we’re not in the middle of a brewing hurricane I’ll have some weirder feelings about this.” He looks up at Wanda with warmth in his tired eyes. “It’s okay, Wanda. Agn- Agatha’s right, it would have been a lot worse if you weren’t here. Let’s get back to the town hall.”
Wanda nods dumbly.
“We’re teleporting this time, I haven’t run like that in decades,” Agatha says, placing a hand on Wanda’s shoulder.
“Weren’t you a getaway driver?” Wanda murmurs, still staring at Abil’s foot. When he’s standing on it, the difference is barely noticeable. She beckons Jensen and Abil and offers her hand. Abil takes it, still holding onto Jensen, and Wanda reaches through space. In an instant, their little band is in the town hall. There’s a wet slap as all the rain hovering between them falls to the floor.
Things seem to have settled down since they left. People aren’t hurrying from place to place, but are huddled around tables. A small group is standing in front of the stage, where Mr. Davis and Sarah Proctor are holding court.
“There you are!” Calls a high voice. Sharon Davis makes her way toward them, relief all over her maternal face. “We thought you might have gotten trapped somewhere, we were rallying a search party.”
Wanda says nothing. She is once again reminded that the people in this town seem to care about her. That they notice when she’s gone. There are tears rising in her throat when Jensen and Abil detach and make their way towards the cots set up in the next room. Agatha is still at her side, her hand still firm and warm on Wanda’s shoulder. She focuses on it and pushes back the tears.
“Thank you, Mrs. Davis,” she says.
A small group of townspeople approach, looking relieved. “Is this them?” one of them asks. Her hoodie is soaked through, her dark hair plastered to her face in strings. “Oh thank God, I really didn’t want to go back out there.”
Wanda smiles at her, and without thinking about it, she blinks, and the woman’s clothes are dry.
The woman’s mouth drops open as she looks down at herself. “Oh shit, thank you!”
“ Ahem,” Agatha says at her side.
Wanda rolls her eyes and hers and Agatha’s clothes dry as well.
Mrs. Davis waves away the group and leads Wanda over to the cot where Jensen and Abil sit side by side.
Abil is still shoeless, examining his new foot while Jensen talks softly in his ear, trying to push a protein bar into his hands. They look up when Wanda approaches.
“You’re really okay with this?” Wanda asks sheepishly, “I can try to fix it.”
“Don’t,” Agatha repeats. She’s holding Seńor Scratchy now, stroking his soft white head. “She has no idea how. And an inexperienced witch is a lot worse than an unlicensed doctor. You want a whole dog leg? Because this is how you get a whole dog leg.”
Wanda winces. While Agatha is wholly justified in her skepticism, it still stings a little to hear her say it so bluntly.
“It’s fine, Wanda. Really, I’m grateful you could do this much.” Abil smiles at her and takes the protein bar Jensen is offering him. “I’d be much worse off without you right now.”
Wanda smiles. It’s going to take a while for that to sink in.