Chapter 146
“Wanda?” Nat shifted, gently pushing back against me.
It was dark. I had no idea what time it was. Half-asleep, I murmured a wordless response, my hand finding my girlfriend’s hip and gently resting there. I was very sleepy and comfortable, but it’s not like I was going to say no if she wanted—
“Can you move over just, like, a little bit? I have no room. I’m right up against the edge.”
…Oh. It was like that, was it? Hurtful. Fine. I said nothing. I simply removed my hand and withdrew, shuffling away from her with a whole-body wriggling motion.
“Thank you.” Nat shifted over in my wake, so that she wasn’t right at the very edge of the mattress anymore. A moment later, I felt her stir again, rolling over to look in my direction when she realised that I hadn’t stopped moving and was, in fact, dragging the blanket and sheet off her as I made my way to the opposite side of the bed. “Wanda?”
I made it to the edge. Goodbye, neglectful girlfriend. Goodbye, cruel world. With one final wiggle, I let myself fall, taking the bedclothes with me as I hit the wooden floorboards with a dull thud.
Ow.
My eyes flew open, staring widely into the darkness. Ow, ow, ow. Boobs. Why? Why. I’d fallen like two feet. I gritted my teeth, fighting off the urge to let out a hiss of air at the unexpected burst of pain. With a supreme exercise of will, I simply lay there, unmoving. Dead. Deceased. Gone from this world. Noise above me signalled that Natasha was clambering over, and a moment later the darkened silhouette of her head peeked over the edge.
She let out a soft huff of air, the noise halfway between amusement and annoyance. “Hey, come on. Get back up here.”
“Mean,” I muttered, closing my eyes again.
“I’m mean?”
“Kicked me out of bed.”
She chuckled. “I didn’t kick you out.”
“Hmph,” I hmphed.
The bed creaked softly as Natasha stood up. A moment later, she joined me on the floor, lying down on top of the blanket. One arm went over me and I quickly braced my own forearm against the inside of hers, protecting my sensitive chest as she gave me a tight squeeze. I snuggled into the spoon. Yes. Good. Better.
“Can we please go back to bed?” Nat asked gently, her breath tickling my ear.
A twitch of my fingers made red wisps of energy flicker into being, lighting up along the edges of the bedclothes before it slowly lifted us up into the air. Natasha’s only reaction was to take the opportunity to slip her other arm under me, hugging me a little tighter. The magic deposited us neatly back on the bed, then winked out again.
Natasha kissed my neck. “Thank you.”
We drifted back off to sleep like that, bodies entwined, the bed square footage shared relatively equally.
The next morning, I shuffled out into the living area to find Yelena draped across the couch. She hadn’t been home when we’d gone to bed, so she must have been out late again.
I made coffee while Natasha showered, considering my options for the day. Nat had a few things that she was stuck doing—meetings, mostly—but there was nothing in my own calendar. Bucky and I had already gone on a second date yesterday for lunch and it might be a bit soon to immediately make a pest of myself again. My eyes fell, once again, on the sleeping figure on the couch.
Hm.
Hot coffee for Nat, ready and waiting for her when she comes out. For Yelena and I…
Natasha emerged from the shower, dressed and ready for the day, while I was working on my plans. She touched my waist briefly as she leaned in to give me a brief peck on the lips, then sat down at the dining table, bringing out a tablet to scroll on while she drank her morning coffee.
Once I was done preparing the first stage of my nefarious scheme, I walked over to where Yelena lay sleeping, carrying my precious cargo: Two bulbous glasses of dark liquid, a small layer of foam on top. Putting one down on the coffee table, I sat on the couch next to Yelena.
She stirred, eyes opening, and squinted at me. “Hm? What?”
“It’s girls’ night.”
“…It’s girls’ night?” Her confusion was understandable. It was just after seven in the morning, after all.
I nodded seriously, holding the drink out to her. “It’s girls’ night,” I repeated.
Still half-asleep and extremely confused, Yelena reached out with both hands and took the offering from me. “What is it?”
“It’s an espresso martini.”
“…боже мой.” She sat up, moving carefully so as not to spill it. “This is exactly how I wanted to spend my day.”
“Yes, I know,” I said with a grin. “I’m your best friend, remember?”
She took a small sip, then looked up at me with heavy-lidded eyes, a smile on her face. “It’s delicious,” she said, her voice climbing an octave.
“I know!” I retrieved my own glass, gently clinked it against hers, then stood up, feeling a little smug. She hadn’t even argued when I said I was her best friend.
“Why are you still sleeping here, anyway?” Yelena asked sleepily as we sipped at our respective drinks. “You’re an Avenger now. Shouldn’t you be staying at the compound?”
“You just want to claim the bed as your own so you never need to get your own place,” I said. “And I refuse to live somewhere I’m not allowed to wander around in my underwear.”
“Mm.” Yelena made a small noise acknowledging the point. “At least you bothered to put on a shirt today.”
I’d grabbed one of my dumb novelty tees when Natasha and I had gotten out of bed. This particular example featured a cute, simplistic children’s storybook cartoon of a worm with a smiley face, a pair of flowers on either side, a sun wearing sunglasses, and deliberately amateurish, uneven lettering that said ‘WAKE UP SLUTS’ above the image and ‘IT’S TIME TO SIN’ below it.
“Hey, if you have a problem with it, all you have to do is say something. But—”
She rolled her eyes, talking over me. “It’s fine.”
“—you do the exact same thing, sometimes.”
“I know, yes. I said it’s fine.”
“Also, at this point, I think Sam is deliberately fucking with me whenever we’re in the common room together. Do you know that I saw that man eat an apple from the bottom up? Right in front of me? The whole thing. Who does that?” Over at the dining table, Nat snorted into her coffee. I looked over at her. “Illegal behaviour. I should report him under Chapter 5.”
“You want to have him written up for misconduct?” Nat asked.
“I want to call the police.”
“On the black man that is minding his own business, because you don’t like what he’s doing?” Yelena asked, a teasingly dubious tone in her voice.
“Okay, hold up!” I said, raising my hands in a gesture of surrender. “Woah, woah. Woah. Wait. That’s not… Don’t do that.”
Yelena grinned and took another sip of her drink. “Enjoying being a bigshot hero, by the way? Have they started making lunch boxes yet?”
“You jest, but I did actually sign some things,” I said. “Stark Industries has a subsidiary that manages Avengers merchandising rights and stuff. I think they’re mostly focused on trying to rush something out for Halloween, take advantage of that whole situation.”
“Situation?”
Natasha looked up from the tablet she had spent most of the morning tapping away at. “Red dresses are selling out all over the place. It’s looking like ‘sexy Scarlet Witch’ is going to be one of the most popular costumes this year.”
“Huh.”
I nodded. It was all over social media. Not just as a Halloween costume, either—some popular cosplayers were already jumping on Scarlet Witch outfits, too. At this stage, people were generally modelling their look on the Wakandan outfit I’d worn during the assault on Eliza’s headquarters in San Francisco, though I was pretty sure that the upskirt shot from the footage of the fight at Avengers Tower that had been doing the rounds had helped, popularity-wise.
My actual official Avengers outfit had yet to make its debut, and while it was a little sexy, I’d settled on something simple and practical that wouldn’t get in the way during fights. Not that that mattered: I’d been an Avenger for a little over a week and people were dressing up as me. There was something that felt utterly surreal about that.
I walked back over to the dining table, where I’d left my phone, and sat down across from Nat. She glanced up from what she was doing and we shared a brief smile, then I unlocked my phone and started to scroll my feed while I drank my espresso martini.
I’d expected the signing of the Avengers Charter a couple of days ago to have overwhelmed the buzz around me, but it absolutely hadn’t. There were just so many eyes on me these days. It was a little scary, but also kinda thrilling.
“Ugh.” I made a face at my phone.
“What’s up?”
“Just… there’s a lot of positive stuff, but you can’t escape the bullshit, either.”
There was a lot of chatter about my looks online. That was to be expected—I was hot, I knew that, so of course there were a lot of people commenting and talking about how hot I was.
Of course, that meant the worst people were commenting on my appearance, too. And what was the current noise being made by those people, you might ask? That I was too masculine, of course. I had been hot, was the assertion, but then something had happened and I’d cut my hair and put on muscle and now I was far too mannish to be attractive.
That particular line of criticism struck a raw nerve that I’d almost forgotten I had.
I was lucky it was only 2015, so it wasn’t likely to tip over into full-on transvestigating. I think I might actually lose it a bit if it did. As it was, I was already fantasising about asking FRIDAY to track down some IP addresses so I could banish some particularly vile examples to the Dimension of Infinite Falling. No one would ever know.
Seeing my expression, Nat shot me a sympathetic look. “You shouldn’t even be reading any of that. Get the media team to manage that stuff, just look at the curated feed.”
“My love, if you believe that I have enough self-control to not repeatedly Google myself or look at the trending hashtags, then I worry that I have somehow misled you about the sort of person I am.”
I glanced over toward the couch, anticipating some sort of smartass comment from Yelena. Her empty glass had been set down on the coffee table, and the former Widow was lying back down, her eyes closed. Aw, she was still all tuckered out. That was fine. She could snooze for a bit longer. We had all day for girls’ night.
“Oh, while we’re on the subject, did you see that the Vanity Fair cover came back for approval?” Nat asked.
“I… did not. One second.” I was still absolutely not used to having a work email that I needed to actually check regularly. I went back to my phone, found the email, opened the attachment and grinned. “Yes. That’s great. It’s good, right?”
The cover image was a headshot of me, nose scrunched up in a genuine-looking expression of happiness. My hair actually looked really good in it, too, though I guess that’s what happens when you get a professional stylist for a photoshoot. The article headline next to my face was ‘THE AVENGERS: BEWITCHED? Why Wanda Maximoff may be Earth’s most captivating hero’.
Nat smiled. “Yeah, it’s really cute.”
“Most captivating, huh? I mean, I’ll take it, but has everyone forgotten that you’re on the team, too?”
She laughed.
I pretended to tap at the screen. “Oh, wow, it looks like there’s also some sort of rumour going around that I’m super fun at parties and amazing in bed! What?” I joked, shooting her a cheeky look. “Who’s going around telling people that?”
“You’re a dork.”
I scrunched up my nose at her, then tapped out a quick reply-all email giving my enthusiastic approval for the cover to go ahead.
“I’m going to have to head in,” Nat said, leaning back in her chair a little and letting out a sigh. “There’s that meeting with the State Department I’ve gotta get ready for.”
“Sucks to be you,” I teased. “See, that’s my secret, Nat—no one trusts me to not mess something like that up, so I never need to go. Become ungovernable. It’s a win-win.”
“You talk a big game, but when you do actually get involved, you make an effort. I’ve seen you do it. Everyone else has, too.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said primly. “I’m a liability. Unmanageable. A troublemaker. A loose cannon. A wild card.”
Natasha shook her head, letting out a small huff of amusement. “Before I head off, there’s actually something else I wanted to run by you real quick,” she said, lifting the tablet she’d been working on and turning it around so I could see. “Do you recognise him?”
I look at the screen. It was a headshot of… the dad from Modern Family? God, what was the actor’s name? I couldn’t remember, exactly, but it’s not like Natasha would be testing my Hollywood and pop culture knowledge, here. “He’s very familiar. I can’t quite place him, though,” I hedged.
“Maybe from around the time of the incident at Culver University?” Nat added. She was teasing info, trying to jog my memory without prejudicing it, watching my reaction carefully.
Culver University was the place that Ross had attacked Bruce back in the original Incredible Hulk movie. I snapped my fingers as the man’s identity clicked into place. “Oh! That’s… the guy. The boyfriend. Betty Ross’s boyfriend. He’s a psychologist or something like that, right?” I’d completely forgotten that he’d been in that movie.
Nat nodded. “Dr Leonard Samson. He’s got an impressive resume. MD and a PhD in psychology. Any concerns from your perspective? Insights?”
I thought back, trying to recall what little I remembered of him. He hadn’t been a particularly important character, but… “Not that I can think of. He seemed like a pretty good guy, from what little I saw of him. He did turn Bruce in at the time, I think, but that’s because his priority was protecting Betty. When it came right down to it, he wasn’t afraid to stand up to her dad. Uh, why?”
“We’re thinking of reaching out to him to join the Avengers’ support organisation.”
I blinked. “A team shrink? What about his university job?”
“We can make him a pretty lucrative offer. The combined specialty is rare, plus I’ve been reading over his published papers—identity adaptation after extreme physiological change, Enhanced/human trauma, identity fracture and DID… He really jumps off the page as the candidate. When it comes down to it, our options are really limited if we want someone with existing experience dealing with Enhanced-adjacent matters, and he’s clearly got interest in the area.”
“Is Bruce okay with this?”
Nat smiled. “He laughed, actually. Yeah, he’s fine with it.”
Dr Leonard Samson. Dr Samson. Doc Samson? Why did that sound familiar? It put me in mind of a pulp action hero, like Doc Savage. That was probably it. I shrugged. “Okay, cool. No objections here, either.”
--
I sat down on the edge of the bed, staring at the copy of The Hobbit in my hands. It had been waiting for me right on the edge of the nightstand, so that I’d definitely see it when I came in. There was a small bookmark poking out of the top.
“What’ve you got there?” Nat asked from the other side of the room, feigning mild curiosity.
I turned slightly so I could level an accusing finger at her. “Nuh uh. You don’t get to pretend that you didn’t do it.”
She smiled. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You put this here,” I asserted, hefting the book in my other hand for emphasis. “Bucky can’t just teleport back and forth between the compound and this apartment, and it’d be weird if he broke in in any case. You’re smuggling things here for him—there was the vase, then the notes, now the book.”
My girlfriend gave a little shrug as she walked over and plopped down on the edge of the bed beside me, looking at the book. “Okay, yeah, I put it there. But I didn’t pry or peek.”
“I was right. You’re conspiring with him.”
“I prefer to think of it as freelance spycraft. He asks, I do. I don’t have any context.” She leaned in, nudging me with her shoulder. “But I think it’s really sweet, and I know how much you like him. It makes me want to help. Plus… maybe I feel a little bad that I never really do anything like this for you.”
I sighed. “Me too.” Nat’s expression shifted, almost imperceptibly, and I hastily clarified myself. “Sorry, no, I don’t mean you! I mean, like, I feel bad that I’m not really doing anything back. It’s…” I wasn’t even sure how to explain what I meant. Bucky was all flowers and handwritten notes and well-thought-out proper dates and… “Okay, so. It’s been, what, two weeks since we started giving this a go? And, well, first there’s the notes. There’s gonna be one inside the book and that’ll be four of them so far. And they’re not even anything! Not love notes, really, they’re just… little messages. Something thoughtful that made him think of me. Or him asking me out. But they’re all in his really nice handwriting so I can’t throw them away so I’m gonna have to start being one of those girls with a shoebox full of these stupid, cute little notes.”
Nat stayed quiet, just listening.
My fingertips traced the title of the book in my lap, then I opened it at the bookmarked page. “We went on our second like, proper date yesterday. He drove us out somewhere really nice and we had this absurdly romantic autumn picnic lunch. It was like something out of a movie,” I told her as I idly picked out the small strip of paper, a handful of words in Bucky’s perfect handwriting on it.
He’d packed some fresh-baked bread and cheese and charcuterie and we’d knocked back two bottles of red wine between us. I was my usual indelicate self and stuffed my face, of course—I’d nearly made myself sick again and ruined it, even, like an idiot. But aside from that it had been so nice and then we’d laid back on the blanket while we talked and even though I’d felt really nauseous for half of it, I’d still felt like I could have stayed there forever.
“While we were talking, Tolkien came up again and I mentioned that it’d been thirty years since I’d read The Hobbit and he grinned and fucking pulled out a copy and it was like he was the one who could do magic. And then he offered to read to me!”
Bucky had gotten right into it, too. He’d done voices. And that had dragged me right into it as well. I’d snuggled up to him, and another hour and a half had gone by like it was nothing. The bookmark he’d left to mark our place had ‘In case you wanted the rest’ casually written across the middle, with the fucking date marked in the corner of it. Just leaving the book with me, so that I could finish it myself if I wanted to, as well as a subtle invitation to bring it back to him instead—an offer, if I wanted him to read to me again. Which I very much did.
And then the bookmark would go in the shoebox, and if I ever looked at it, I’d remember this ridiculous, romantic second date and—
My vision had blurred, tears welling up in the corners of my eyes, a tightly-wound ball of unidentifiable emotion in my chest. I angrily scrubbed at my face with the heel of my palm. “And now why am I crying?! Fucking… stupid.”
“Hey,” Nat said softly. She reached out with a hand, gently touching my chin to move my head so I would look at her. A faintly bemused smile curved the corners of her lips. “It’s okay. You’re feeling overwhelmed?”
“I don’t know if ‘overwhelmed’ is right,” I said, shaking my head. “Things are just different. With you it was like, we went on one sort-of date, both of us went ‘yep, this works’, then we basically immediately settled into… this,” I said, using one hand to gesture vaguely between the two of us. “I know that, in reality, it’s been less than six months, but we’ve been through so much already and being with you has always just felt…”
“Natural,” Nat supplied softly. “Comfortable.”
“Exactly! We’re just… together. We exist in each other’s space like we’ve already been doing it for years. But with Bucky, it’s like… He’s courting me. Romantically. And I do love it and he’s amazing and it’s really nice but I’m just not used to it and it makes me feel so self-conscious sometimes. Like I’m doing this wrong, somehow. Like he’s got these huge expectations for a romantic relationship and I’m just not measuring up to them.” A tear that had been making its way down my cheek dripped off my chin.
Natasha put her arms around me and I buried my face in her shoulder. It was taking all of my willpower not to actually burst into tears, and I had no idea why I was even crying. This was stupid.
“I think maybe that’s normal,” Nat said. One of her hands was stroking the back of my head gently. “To worry about not meeting expectations when you’re really invested in a relationship. I know I do it too, sometimes.”
I pulled back abruptly so I could look at Nat like she’d just grown a second head. “What are you talking about? You worry about… what? Not measuring up to my expectations? What? That’s… that’s…” It was the most utterly ridiculous thing I’d ever heard her say.
She let out a soft huff of amusement. “Don’t worry about it. It’s not—”
“No, no, no,” I cut her off, wiping at my face again and taking a deep breath. “You can’t just say something baffling like that then try to move on. What?”
There was a moment where a brief look of discomfort flickered across Nat’s face. She didn’t quite flinch away from the look I was giving her, but she shifted in place, hunching her shoulders very slightly, and turned so she was looking at the wall rather than directly at me.
“Sometimes I feel like I’m still trying to catch up,” she started, hesitating slightly as she searched for the right words. “You saw so much about me. Things no one else has, or ever will.”
It was my turn to be quiet, just letting her have the space to talk it out.
“But there’s still so much of you that I don’t know anything about. Sometimes I think that… You saw a different version of you, right?” Nat glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. “Well, you saw a different version of me, too. Someone who went through a bunch of stuff that I haven’t. And won’t, now that things are different. Sometimes I worry that it’s that Natasha you fell in love with. An idea of me, or what I could’ve been, rather than…” She trailed off, gesturing to herself wordlessly.
“Nat, no, I…”
What did I even say to that? A heavy silence stretched out between us for a few seconds before I stood, snapping the book I was holding shut and dropping it back onto the nightstand where I’d found it. Nat made to stand up, too, but I turned, taking a step so that I was directly in front of her, before dropping to my knees.
“I can’t lie and say that what I saw of that version of you didn’t influence my feelings, but I didn’t fall in love with her. I just… I got a sneak peek of what sort of person you are, is all,” I told her, taking both of her hands in mine and looking earnestly up into her face. My cheeks were hot, my eyes still wet and puffy. I probably looked awful. Oh well. “What you’d do, if it really came down to it. How selfless you can be, even when there’s no one around to see it. How brave you are. The lengths you’re willing to go to for the people you care about, or how much of yourself you’ll sacrifice to save people.”
Natasha gently extracted one of her hands from mine so she could reach down and brush my cheek with the back of her fingers. She didn’t say anything.
“A lot of people think that Steve’s the heart of the team, but I know better—he’s just the leader. You are the heart of the Avengers. Every time I see you, you’re stronger. More amazing. I know there’s a lot of bad in your past that you think defines you, and I saw some of that, but it’s not what I see when I look at you. It’s your compassion. Your courage. Your resilience. The good that you struggle to see in yourself is what I admire the most about you.” I sniffed, blinking to clear away the tears in my eyes. “Yeah, I guess I cheated a little bit. I already knew who you were, coming into this. But when it comes to how I feel about you, it’s not because of that. When I think about you? How I feel about you? About loving you? I don’t think of what I saw in my visions at all. I think about cuddling up on the couch next to you. You putting up with my dumb jokes. Holding me when I’ve needed it. Or even just chasing you out of the kitchen because on top of everything else you’re also somehow a better cook than I am and I don’t want you showing me up. That’s the Natasha I love.”
Tears had started to track their way down Nat’s cheeks, as well. Oh, good, now we were both crying. “I love you, too,” she said, the words thick in her mouth.
“I don’t know why,” I said, letting out a small laugh. “Sometimes I look at you and I just—I have no idea how I managed to trick you into liking me? I mean…” Leaning back on my heels, I gestured to myself with my free hand. “You really spent more than five minutes talking to this mess and were still somehow actually interested in me? You’re genuinely the kindest, most badass person I know. What could I possibly have ever done to deserve you?”
Nat gave my hand a tug, leaning forward a bit.
Obediently, I started to lift myself back up off my heels, so I could meet her halfway. “Sorry if I’m too much, sometimes. I just—”
Even over my own flush, I could feel the heat that had risen in her cheeks and lips as she cut me off with a kiss. Both her hands came up to cradle my face and I leaned in harder, our tears intermingling on my tongue, so sharp and salty that it was almost too much. I lost myself in her, savouring the feel and taste of her. We broke off eventually, though we didn’t pull our faces away from each other.
“I’m sorry,” Nat murmured, and I could feel the vibrations of her words through my skin. “What were you saying?”
I let out a short huff of amusement. “I was just… running my mouth like an idiot,” I replied, then my voice dropped lower, into a more suggestive register. “You really shouldn’t leave it unoccupied.”