Look What You Made Me Do (MCU Wanda-SI/OC)

I leaned heavily on the edges of the sink, the white porcelain cold under my palms. My stomach churned with a dread mixture of anxiety and nausea. And, on top of that, I’d been feeling utterly exhausted all day today for seemingly no reason, even though I’d gotten a full night’s sleep the night before. All of which was really not ideal, considering the interview I was supposed to be headed to shortly.

Part of me really wanted to just call in and cancel. Try to reschedule for another time. But then Maria would probably be really annoying about the whole thing, considering that I was the one who’d pushed for this interview in the first place, and I really didn’t want to deal with that, either. Ugh.

It was just nerves. Push through. Come on, Wanda.

There was a knock at the door. “Hey, you okay?” Natasha’s slightly muffled voice came from the other side.

“Yeah…” I grumbled, glaring at myself in the mirror.

The door half-opened, my girlfriend peering inside. When she saw that I was already dressed and ready, she pushed it all the way open and stepped up behind me. I met her eyes in the mirror and she gave me a sympathetic look. “Not feeling it?”

I sighed. “Something like that. Can you give me a pep talk?”

“A pep talk?”

I nodded.

Nat thought for a moment before responding. “Do you want an actual pep talk, or your version of a pep talk? Because those are two different things.”

Huh. I turned to face her, leaning back against the sink. “Well… Now I kinda wanna hear both?”

“Okay. Regular one first.” She reached out a hand, gently brushing my cheek with the back of her fingers. “You’re gonna do great, my love. You’re always nervous before these things, but you always do well at them, and I’m always so proud of you when you do. Okay? Finish getting ready and we’ll go and nail this thing. It’ll be fun. You’re going to have such a good time. Then it’ll be done and you’ll be in a really great mood. I promise.”

I grinned, nuzzling into her hand a bit. “Okay. That was pretty good. But then what’s my version of a pep talk?”

Natasha took a step forward, right into my personal space, and leaned in. At first, I thought she was going to kiss me, but she diverted to the side at the last moment, our lips narrowly missing each other as she murmured directly into my ear. “Get this done, then afterwards I’ll do whatever you want. Whatever you want. You can do anything to me.” She planted a feather-light kiss on my cheek.

“Oh my god.” My face flushed. “Ah, when you say ‘anything’, does that include—”

“Anything,” she repeated firmly as she pulled away, a wicked-looking smile curving her lips.

“I…” My mouth had gone dry, heart pounding a little harder in my chest. The nausea was still there, of course, but… “Give me five minutes. I just need to pee again and then we’ll portal right over.”

“Good girl.”

A short while later, the two of us were being directed into the recording studio. Beyond the small crew bustling about getting things ready, two men were waiting to greet us. One, I recognised: Sean Evans, only a tiny bit taller than me, bald, stubbly beard. He was dressed a little more formally than I’d expected him to be, wearing a nice suede jacket over a black button-up. Then again, I wasn’t a rapper or baseball player, so it looked like he’d tried to match the ‘vibe’ I’d set so far with my official appearances, which I appreciated.

Part of me had agonised over exactly what sort of look to go with for the interview, and I’d settled on the pants and jacket of my red pantsuit over a strappy cami with a bit of a lower neckline. It was a touch more causal than the full three-piece with a button up, and the jacket was a surprise tool that I was hoping would help me later, partway through the interview.

“Ms Maximoff, Ms Romanoff, it’s really nice to meet both of you. An honour. I really mean that,” he greeted us with a warm, genuine smile. “I’m Sean, this is Chris.”

Chris—Schonberger, I was pretty sure was his last name? The co-creator slash producer—was almost a full head taller than his fellow, and handrail thin. “Yeah, it’s really good to meet you guys! Absolutely not every day you get to say hi to a couple of the Avengers.” The two of them switched out so that they could shake each of us by the hand.

“Just Wanda, please,” I told them. “And the honour’s mine. I’m a fan of the show.”

I saw the two of them exchange a quick, barely-perceptible glance of surprise. “That’s really good to hear,” Sean said with a small laugh. “We were honestly a little surprised to hear from you. We’re still establishing the show; getting one of the Avengers really wasn’t on our radar as a possibility for the first season.”

“Oh, you weren’t the only ones who were surprised, trust me,” I said with a grin, thinking back to Maria’s exact expression when I’d told her I wanted to do an interview on this relatively new, still-kinda-obscure YouTube show.

“It’s just the two of you?” Chris asked, peering behind us as if to check if there was some hidden support crew hidden in the wings. “No glam squad or…?”

“Just us,” Nat confirmed. “We don’t like to make a huge production of these things. Maria Hill would normally be here, too, but she had something else to take care of. If you think Wanda needs some last looks for the camera, we’re happy for your own team to do some touch ups.”

He shook his head and grinned at me. “We’ll do a camera check, but you look great—I was just a little surprised that you’re on your own. Machine Gun Kelly had like twenty people in his entourage. This makes things a lot simpler.”

Sean half-turned, gesturing for us to follow him. “We’ve just got a little bit of extra paperwork to get out of the way, the waiver and stuff. Then we can walk you through everything.”

Maybe an hour later, I was sitting across from him on the set.

Laid out in front of each of us, atop a round, tablecloth-draped table, was a plate and napkins, a wooden paddle with a row of ten crispy fried chicken wings across it, and a small tumbler of cold milk. Between us, dividing the table in half, was a row of hot sauce bottles, with a half-dozen bottles of water—generic ‘First We Feast’ wraps covering their original labels—sitting to my right.

There were a few cameras set up to catch us from different angles, including one directly above us, looking down at the table. Natasha was standing well back from them, next to Chris. She grinned at something he said to her.

“Alright; and three, two…”

Sean looked at the camera that was pointed at him from over my shoulder. “Hey, what’s going on guys? For First We Feast, its Hot Ones, the show with hot questions and even hotter wings, and today I’m joined in studio by Wanda Maximoff. How you going, Wanda?”

I grinned at him. “I am fantastic, Sean. Thanks for having me.”

He smiled back. “Thanks for being here! Do you know how this show works?”

“I do, but let’s run through it for the camera, shall we?”

He let out a small huff of amusement and gestured to the wooden paddle in front of him. “Sure! There are ten chicken wings, ten sauces, ten questions. As we go further along in the interview, the wings get hotter, the questions get hotter. So hot, in fact, that you might just need to bail.” He waved a hand for emphasis. “We have a safe word—if you need to tap out, you just say ‘I need an adult’ and then you don’t have to eat any more wings. We’ll jump straight to the hottest question and that’s it. Alright?”

My eyes widened briefly in surprise at the safe word phrase. “Alright,” I acknowledged with a small chuckle.

“If you make it all the way through, we’ll give you thirty uninterrupted seconds to plug something, or talk about whatever you want. That sound good to you?”

“Sounds great.”

“Let’s get right into it, then! This first hot sauce is just Texas Pete’s Hot Sauce. It’s one you’ll see in a lot of restaurants.”

I held the first wing up in front of me and looked at it. It was still warm, but I could already tell that by the time we got to the end we were going to be eating cold wings, which wasn’t ideal.

I’d come here with a plan: My expectation was that I’d be able to clear all of the sauces no problem. I’d always been decent at handling spicy food, plus I had the Heart-Shaped Herb backing me up, after all. My intent had been to eat each wing properly rather than just taking a bite or two. I wanted to impress. Show off a bit. But my stomach was still not feeling super great, and cold, greasy chicken wings didn’t really seem like something that was going to sit particularly well.

Oh well. No hesitation. I hoed right into it, stripping the meat from the bone with my teeth.

Sean ate his own wing, taking a few bites before looking back over at me. “Fine?”

I nodded, picking up a napkin to wipe the greasiness off my fingers. “Fine. No problems.”

“Alright, so, it’s five in the afternoon, you’ve just had a big, stressful Avengers fight. After you debrief, or whatever, where do you go, what do you do, to unwind?”

I shot him a flat look. “You know my girlfriend’s the Black Widow, right? How do you think I unwind after a mission?”

Sean let out a surprised laugh. “I…” he started, hesitated, then let out another small chuckle. “I really don’t think I can answer that.”

I leaned forward, a serious look on my face. “Well, I definitely can: A lot of sex, Sean,” I told him matter-of-factly, tapping the table with a finger for emphasis. There were even some scattered chuckles from the crew. “I have a lot of really, really good sex. And, I mean, I indulge in other things, too. Drinking, you know. But mostly—just to really be clear about this—a lot of sex. With my girlfriend. Who is standing right over there, shaking her head and looking like she’s regretting the fact that they let me out to do this interview.”

She wasn’t, really. She was smiling, though she did roll her eyes when I flashed a grin in her direction.

“That’s absolutely fair, I’d say.”

“And here I thought you said the questions were going to get hotter,” I teased. “We’re off to a pretty spicy start already, aren’t we?”

“I guess so,” Sean said with a grin. “Alright, number two: Cholula Hot Sauce.”

We ate. The spiciness of it surprised me, a little bit—it wasn’t bad at all, but my expectation had been that I’d barely even notice the heat for the first few. That wasn’t the case, which was a little worrying.

“No big deal, right?” Sean asked, watching me carefully.

“Yeah. Easy.”

“You grew up in Sokovia, right? Spent your whole life there? But you hardly have an accent.”

“Oh, it really comes and goes. I’m told that, sometimes, I even sound a little like I have an Australian accent. Not sure how that works,” I lied jokingly. “But yeah, my English is fine. Pietro and I, we essentially grew up in a bilingual household. Our parents were both Sokovian, but…”

“You spoke a lot of English at home?”

I nodded. “Yeah. Our papa, he sold bootlegs… Movies, TV shows. The only rule of TV night was that we had to use it to practice English.” I smiled, fragments of memories tugging at the edge of my mind. “Whenever it was my turn to pick, it was always the Dick Van Dyke Show. I feel like I knew every episode by heart.”

Sean smiled. “You liked older sitcoms?”

“I was obsessed. The rest of my family loved them as well. I Love Lucy, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie… We watched all of them together.”

“That’s fun—I never watched the Dick Van Dyke Show, but Bewitched was always a favourite. Alright, so, for number three we have the El Yucateco Caribbean.”

Once I finished it off, I took a deep breath, staring down at the rest of the wings. My tongue was definitely starting to burn a little already, but I really didn’t want to resort to the milk or breaking open one of the bottles of water this early. It was only the third wing! Had I really misjudged my spice tolerance this badly? Or had they upped the ante to match my rep as an Avenger? “A little hotter. But good. Still okay.”

“How are you doing with the sudden spotlight? Stepping up onto the Avengers, having everyone talking about you. What’s the worst part about suddenly becoming famous like that?”

“Oh, you know,” I said with a small shrug. “Just all the money and the free stuff people keep trying to give me. Opportunities to do stuff like this. It’s a fucking nightmare.”

Sean laughed. “Oh, terrible, yeah.” I grinned back at him but didn’t elaborate. When it became obvious that that was all I was going to say, Sean gestured to one of the bottles in front of us. “Let’s move on to number four. This one’s Lottie’s—this mustard-coloured one.”

We got into it and, by the time I’d dropped the remains of the wing on my plate, I was starting to feel hot. A warm flush had risen in my cheeks. I might’ve even been sweating, a little bit.

“You’ve been a member of the Avengers for just over two weeks now, but you’ve been involved with them for a bit longer than that. What would you say Tony Stark’s most annoying habit is?”

I full-on cackled. “Oh, wow. Where do I start? Did anyone actually vet these questions? Because I feel like I’m going to end up saying something you’re not going to be allowed to air.” I took a breath. “Tony is… Uh. Hmm. Stark Industries technically owns the Avengers compound, and Tony acts like a grumpy landlord about it sometimes. ‘Who put coffee grounds in the garbage disposal? Am I running a bed and breakfast for a biker gang?’ That sort of thing.” I looked directly at the camera. “It was Sam. Sam did it.”

He laughed again. “Okay, well, next up we have—”

“Oh, he doesn’t look like he’s having a good time,” I said, eyeing off the label of the next bottle—Pain is Good, Louisiana Style. The illustration on the label was a man’s face, twisted in an agonised expression, mouth open.

“Yeah, he looks like he’s in a lot of pain,” Sean agreed.

There was something about the flavour of this one that absolutely didn’t sit right. I swallowed and immediately started coughing, covering my mouth with the back of my hand for a few moments while I worked through it, swallowing hard in an attempt to push down the sudden wave of nausea.

Sean shot me a little bit of a sympathetic look, though he was still smiling. “You all good?”

“Uh huh.” I nodded a few times as I worked through it. “Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh.” Dropping my hand away from my face, I took a couple of deep breaths. “I’m good. I’m fine. That just… really hit the back of my throat. In, like, the not fun way.” I gave the glass of milk next to my plate a resentful look, blinking away a little bit of blurriness. “There’s water coming out of holes in my face.”

“Yeah, that’s what happens. You’re going for the milk?”

Reluctantly, I nodded and picked up the glass. The coolness helped, definitely, with the burning sensation in my mouth and throat, and by the time I put it back down it was more than half empty.

Sean mirrored the action, though he drank a little bit less of his than I had. That was the format—he would take the opportunity for relief whenever I did. A bit of pinkness had risen in his face as well, at least. Part of me had hoped to force him to sit in it a bit longer without anything to help, but I was really struggling a lot more than I’d expected to be at this point.

I picked up my napkin, trying to scour the grease and sauce from my fingers as I took a few deep, open-mouth breaths. The addition of a not-insignificant amount of dairy to the collection of greasy, spicy chicken in my stomach might’ve actually made things a little worse, overall.

“There’s been a lot of gossip and speculation about you ever since you made your debut alongside the Avengers. What’s something people consistently get wrong about you?”

“That sort of gossip itself has been a little surreal, to be honest. There were some specific personal reasons that I didn’t join the Avengers at the same time as Pietro, but people sort of took that and ran with it? I feel like everyone sort of sees me as this sort of mysterious, aloof figure, and that really couldn’t be further from the truth.”

“You don’t think there’s anything mysterious about you?”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed so far, but there’s really not much of a filter here,” I said, gesturing toward my mouth. “For the most part, I’m a pretty simple and straightforward person.”

“Alright,” Sean said, nodding. “So, we’re over the halfway mark. This one’s number six.”

I stared at it. “100% Pain?”

“That’s what it’s called. It’s about two and a half times hotter than a jalapeno.”

Time to show off a little bit, maybe?

I lifted my hand, tiny wisps of red chaos magic dripping from my fingers, and levitated the chicken wing to my mouth. I took a couple of small bites before discarding the rest. When I swallowed, my entire body shuddered and an involuntary noise escaped my lips. I grabbed one of the bottles of water, cracking it open, and took a swig, trying to rinse the burning sensation from my mouth. “Aggghhhh. Sorry for the sound effects.”

“That’s okay, that’s okay,” Sean said. “I get it. I’m sharing in the experience with you. And I can’t just, you know, casually eat using my telekinetic powers.”

“Oh, there are a lot of fun things I can do with telekinesis, trust me.”

“I believe you, one hundred per cent. That actually leads in nicely to the next question: What is that, anyway? Your power?”

I stared at him for a moment, letting myself breathe, blinking the shininess from my eyes, then glanced around the studio. No sorcerous portals opened up. No Masters of the Mystic Arts were breaking down the doors to stop me from breaking the Masquerade. The Ancient One hadn’t politely asked me to keep my mouth shut. I ran my tongue over my bottom lip as I hesitated for a moment.

…Even if no one was stopping me, it was probably not the smartest idea to just blurt stuff like that out in the middle of an interview without at least talking to the others, first. “I won’t get into the details, but basically it lets me do whatever I want. It’s… a malleable energy that’s inside me, that I can use for a whole heap of different things.”

“Okay, that’s fair. Pretty powerful, from what I’ve heard.”

“Yep.”

“So, what made you go with ‘the Scarlet Witch’?”

“Hey,” I scolded him. “No, no, no. I’ve been lax about it so far, but that definitely counts as an extra question. Come on.” I twirled my fingers in a ‘let’s get on with it’ gesture.

He snorted. “Okay, okay. Well, this is number seven, which is Blair’s Original Death Sauce.”

“Oh, good. Death sauce. That really sounds appealing.”

“Doesn’t it just?”

I’d given up on using my hands entirely at this point. No more greasy, dangerously saucy fingers, thank you very much. Levitating the next wing to my face, I bit into it, chewed mechanically a few times, and forced myself to swallow. It burned my lips. It burned my tongue and the inside of my mouth. It burned my throat as it went down. I was pretty sure my entire face was red, at this point.

“Fuuuuuuuck,” I huffed. “It’s hot in here. Are you hot?”

Sean nodded. “Yeah, it’s hot. This is kinda hitting me a little, too, at this point.”

Okay. Time for the surprise tool. I undid the button of the suit jacket I was wearing and shrugged out of it, revealing bare shoulders and the full extent of my Celestial markings.

“Oh!” Sean made a noise, eyes widening a little bit, as I carelessly tossed the jacket off to one side.

“Bam.” I grinned at him half-heartedly.

“Then, I might also, just—” Sean tentatively reached for his own jacket. Right, he was supposed to match me, so whenever I did something to take the edge off, he would do it too.

“Oh, yes, please do.” I gestured vaguely with my hand. As he took his jacket off, I leaned back in my chair, exhaling long and loud as I fanned myself a little with my hand. “And as for the Scarlet Witch… It’s more of a title than a codename. Something I was already stuck with, thanks to circumstances beyond my control. So I thought I may as well own it, you know?” I sniffed loudly. This was really starting to clear out my sinuses.

“A title?”

“I… can’t really talk about it. Global security, you know how it is.”

“That’s okay, yeah, we’ll just cut me asking that bit. Okay, so, next up we have Dave’s Temporary Insanity Hot Sauce. Which is twelve times hotter than a jalapeno.”

“…Twelve times?” I asked, looking at him with horror. “Weren’t we at, like, two and a half times a couple of wings ago?”

“We were. It ramps up pretty fast, yeah.”

When I bit into number eight, I immediately started coughing. My gorge rose in the back of my throat and I bent over, hiding my face in the crook of my elbow.

“You doing alright over there, Wanda?”

I didn’t look up at first, just using my free hand to give him the finger. I heard him laugh. Once I’d composed myself a little and no longer felt like I was in immediate danger of dying, I lifted my face back up and looked at him resentfully. “That one hurt my feelings. Why would you do this? I hate you,” I told him. “I mean, I don’t hate you. But I kind of do hate you.”

Sean just laughed again. “Yeah, I completely understand. You’re okay, though?”

“Euughhh. I labour under the tyranny of my flesh.”

“Do you want some ice cream?” he asked.

“There’s ice cream?” I breathed, my eyes widening. “Yes. Please.”

A few seconds later, one of the crew members appeared at my side, handing me a cold, little bowl of white ice cream. He almost startled me. At some point, the world had seemed to shrink down to just the table and the guy across from me, the horrible burning in my mouth and churning of my stomach the only things that really mattered. More dairy was probably not a good idea for my stomach right now, but I did not care.

There was a little metal spoon in the bowl, and I scooped a tiny bit of the frigid sweetness into my mouth. The noise I made was almost indecent.

“So, what’s—”

“Sean,” I cut him off. “What if we just stopped talking for a little bit? Is that okay? Can we do that?”

He grinned and nodded. “Okay. Take your time.” He had a small bowl of his own, and we spent the next minute or two eating in silence.

After we finished, I leaned back again, letting my head loll backwards as I took a deep breath. When I straightened back up, I used a fresh napkin to wipe at my face. “Okay. I’m good. Let’s go. Question.”

“The tattoos are pretty new, right?” Sean asked, gesturing toward my arm. I held it out toward him, palm up, so the camera could see the full extent of the golden markings properly, from my palm all the way up to my chest. “It’s a really big piece of work to get done all at once. Do you have any others? What’s the significance?”

Another question that I wasn’t sure exactly how to answer. “I don’t have any others, no. But these aren’t exactly normal tattoos. I did them myself, actually. Cosmic power stuff. Celestial sacred geometries. They help… focus my powers, I guess I can say.”

He raised his eyebrows. “You did them yourself? That’s impressive.”

“You know how, like, Thor is a god from Norse mythology?”

“Yeah?”

“Another god taught me how to do this sort of stuff.”

“Wow. That’s pretty cool.”

“I am extremely cool, yes,” I huffed, dabbing at my sweaty forehead with a fresh napkin.

Sean chuckled.

Two wings left. Only two. I got this.

“Okay, so we’re going from Dave’s Temporary Insanity Hot Sauce, to just the straight thing: Dave’s Insanity Hot Sauce.”

I bit into it and immediately broke down into a coughing fit, barely managing to choke it down. Tears were streaming down my face. “I’m sorry, I can’t, I can’t—”

“You’re tapping out?” Sean asked. His face was a bit redder now, too, his eyes shiny with moisture.

Something inside me rebelled, stubbornly refusing the way out. “No, I can—I can. Fuck. I can’t. I can. I can!”

Reaching across the table, I grabbed another bottle of water, twisted the lid off, then held it over my head, pouring the contents all over me. I ignored the laughs around me, closing my eyes and focusing on powering through the nausea and burning pain in my mouth, taking deep breaths.

Eventually, I opened my eyes again, glaring at Sean’s grinning face for a moment before I looked down at myself. “God,” I gestured to my soaking wet top. “I’m glad I’m wearing a bra under this, otherwise you really wouldn’t be able to air this bit.”

“Ready?”

“Hit me.”

“Your abilities give you the power to solve problems in ways that most people couldn’t even imagine. How do you decide when not to use that power?”

“Ah…” I hesitated slightly before answering. Okay, yeah. That was a hot question. “I’m going to be so for-real right now: I told you before that my power’s really flexible, that I can do a lot of different things with it? Sometimes there’s a problem in front of me and, technically, there’s a way I could use my powers that would perfectly solve it. One hundred per cent. But it’s kinda fucked up. I could do some messed up shit, if I wanted to.”

“And what stops you?”

“Thinking about all the times I didn’t stop myself,” I said softly. “And thinking about what the people I care about would think, you know?”

“You’ve got a strong support network, right? Your brother, your girlfriend…”

“I do. Not just them, either.” I forced a grin, trying to recapture the less heavy atmosphere we’d had for most of the interview. “Let me tell you, when Captain America himself looks disappointed in you? That’s the sort of thing you only ever want to have happen once.”

“I can definitely believe that. Alright, last hurdle.” Sean reached over and grabbed the final bottle of hot sauce from the table and unscrewed the lid. “We’re gonna put a fresh dab on this one, okay?”

“Okay…” My voice was a little unsteady my eyes locked on what he was doing. Leaning heavily on the table, I covered my mouth with my hand as I watched him add the extra hot sauce to his wing.

“This is Mad Dog 357. It’s almost… I don’t wanna psyche you out or anything, but it’s almost twice as hot as the last one.”

I let out a helpless, almost delirious giggle from behind my hand. When he offered me the bottle, I hesitated briefly before taking it.

“Just be careful, this one’s not gonna be fun,” he said as I started to tip the bottle.

“Sean.” I shot him a venomous look. I had to actively fight the urge to make my eyes glow red—that would probably have been a bit too much. “What if we stopped talking for a little bit?”

He grinned but didn’t say anything else, waiting as I very carefully tapped out a small measure of the Mad Dog onto the last wing on my side of the table.

After I put the bottle back, I stared at the deadly weapon in front of me for a moment. “Fucking hell, motherfucker,” I muttered under my breath for a moment before I looked back up at Sean. “I’m gonna eat, just… the bare minimum of this one,” I told him.

Sean nodded. “That’s a smart move. You gotta get the dab for it to count, though.” He lifted his wing and gestured toward me with it.

I picked the freshly-sauced wing up with my fingers—no magic, for the last one—and tapped it against his like we were clinking glasses together. Then we ate.

My lips were on fire. Everything burned. I’d been dismembered during the fight with the Eternals and this still felt worse, somehow. Even Sean half-turned away from me, red in the face, blinking rapidly as he powered through it.

I swallowed and let out a shaky breath, staring hollowly at him. “This is genuinely upsetting,” I told him. “I feel like I made a terrible mistake, coming here. I’m going to have an awful time in the bathroom, later.”

Sean had finished his as well, straightening back up and nodding with what looked like an almost regretful smile on his face. “That is a major part of the experience, yeah.” He took a breath to compose himself. “Fuck. Yeah. That one’s always rough. Last question, and I know we’ve already talked a little bit about you and your girlfriend, but… Black Widow. When it came out that the two of you were seeing each other, the internet kind of exploded. I gotta ask: Did you make the first move, or did she?”

I took a few breaths, sniffing as I picked up another napkin and scrubbed at my fingers. “…I’m gonna sit here, with my blotchy red face, tears running down my cheeks, bloodshot—are my eyes bloodshot?”

“A little, yeah.”

“Bloodshot eyes, snotty, just… feeling absolutely gross. A complete mess. And I’m going to tell you…” I coughed, then leaned in very seriously. “I seduced the shit out of her. It was all me. She took one look at all of this and it was all over.”

“Yeah, that makes sense. Totally understandable.” Sean let out a huff of air, clearly still struggling a little bit as well. I dropped my head onto the table, next to my plate, with a dull thud. “Auuuuughghhhhghghghghhghghghghggh,” I let out a long, loud noise, something halfway between a scream and a whimper, stomping my feet repeatedly under the table.

“Well, you’ve earned that plug. Thirty seconds, talk about whatever. Anything you want.” He gestured. “Thirty seconds, all you. Go ahead. Right into the camera.”

I lifted my head from the table, staring at the camera in front of me. “I don’t actually have anything to plug. I just thought the show was cool and I wanted to be on it. Which is a life decision I’m kinda regretting, right now.”

Anything I want, huh…? Sean’s phrasing reminded me of my conversation with Nat, earlier. My girlfriend had stepped a little closer, moving over to just behind the camera. She shot me a sympathetic smile.

I gestured with my hand. “Come here. Nat. Come.”

Natasha hesitated only briefly before walking up to the table, stepping into the shot. “How are you holding up?” she asked softly.

I looked over at the host. “Sean, is it okay if, instead of plugging something, I just make out with my girlfriend sloppy style for the camera?” That got a big laugh from the crew.

Sean was wiping at his eyes with a napkin. “Sure, this is for whatever you want it to be for.”

“Absolutely not,” Nat cut in, letting out a small snort of amusement. “Not until you’ve had a chance to clean yourself up, at least.”

I looked back at her. “Whatever I want…” I reminded her.

She closed her eyes for a moment, then sighed, the corners of her mouth twitching as she tried not to smile or laugh. “This isn’t exactly what I had in mind.”

“Come here?” I gestured.

Reluctantly, Nat stepped in close, letting me lean in to give her a kiss. I didn’t let her get away with a tiny peck, either—this was easily the grossest, sloppiest kiss I was pretty sure I’d ever given anyone. There was a lot of tongue. The both of us broke down giggling a little, halfway through, and then when I finally pulled away Nat was giving me a wide-eyed look of horror. She smacked her lips a few times, blinking. “That’s really bad, even second-hand. Wow.”

“Right?” I said to her, then turned back to Sean again. “That’s it, yeah? We can go now?”

“That’s it.” He stood up, smiling. “Thanks again for coming. This has been really good. You did well!”

“Yeah, thanks. It was… an experience.” I was already fishing out my sling ring.

“We’ll send you the preliminary edit in a couple of days, and—”

“Absolutely, sounds good. Thanks again for having me, but I really want to go have a shower and stuff, like, right now.”

He chuckled. “That’s fair enough. Alright, we’ll be in touch.”

Once I spun up a portal, Natasha and I stepped through onto the manicured lawn of the compound, heading directly into the main building and up the stairs to the common room.

“You doing okay?” Nat asked, smiling as she carefully wiped at the corners of her mouth with her sleeve.

“Yeah. Just… I need to pee, and I need to shower. Not the fun kind of shower, either. But I do wanna use the fancy one, with the horizontal jets.”

She laughed. “Okay.”

As we reached the top of the stairs, I saw that a few of the others were gathered around the kitchen island—Pietro, Bucky, Sam and Steve—currently in the process of unpacking a set of takeaway containers from a bag.

It took a moment for the smell to hit me, the gorge rising in the back of my throat in protest.

“Hey! There she is,” Sam said with a grin. “We picked up some Indian—thought we could have something spicy, to celebrate? Got your favourite. Saag paneer, extra hot, just the way you like it.”

I made a strangled noise in the back of my throat and swept straight past them, heading for the bathroom.