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

“Welcome back to Sokovia, Captain Rogers, Ms Romanov, Mr Barton.”

To their credit, the Sokovian prison guards had only made them wait awkwardly at the entrance gate for a few minutes before their escort had come out to meet them. Nat had spent the time in the same way she always did whenever she was in a new place—noting sightlines and potential cover, mentally marking the positions of each tower and guard, identifying the makes of the weapons she could see to predict effective engagement ranges, and pre-planning escape routes if they were suddenly ambushed. Clint was doing the same, pointing things out she might have missed with a twitch of his hand, a subtle glance, or even just a shift in his body language. You know, just normal people things.

Nat dipped her head slightly in acknowledgement as she was spoken to.

“Yeah, thanks,” said Clint, flashing a forced smile.

Next to them, Steve stepped forward to shake the man’s offered hand. “Thanks for having us. Colonel Zemo, I presume?”

The Sokovian official smiled lightly. “The same.”

Steve looked at the pair of guards armed with assault rifles flanking him. “Expecting trouble?” he asked lightly.

“Not at all, just a formality. Protocols, you know how it is. Apologies for the inconvenience. If you’ll follow me?”

NATO had authorised the Avengers’ request to question Wolfgang von Strucker days ago, but the Sokovian government had been dragging its heels, deliberately bogging down the process with ‘protocols’. They could only delay for so long, however, and they’d eventually agreed to host them on the condition that one of their officials would attend to ensure the interview was ‘conducted appropriately’, i.e. to make sure that they didn’t miss out on any intel that came from it.

Flanked by guards, Zemo escorted them into the facility. Nat took in the condition of the place as they walked. Cracked, crudely-poured raw concrete, eroded brickwork, exposed water pipes and electricity cables… this place was falling apart. Even the cells in HYDRA’s research base, itself a repurposed military fortress, had been in better condition than those here in Novi Grad. It was pretty clear that whatever infrastructure funding was meant to be maintaining this place was being funnelled into some corrupt official’s pocketbook—probably someone exactly like Zemo.

She’d done their research on the man that would be meeting them, of course: Colonel Helmut Zemo, decorated intelligence officer, fabulously wealthy member of the landed aristocracy, and commander of EKO Scorpion, an elite paramilitary death squad. With his resume, it wouldn’t have surprised her if he was secretly working for HYDRA as well, but she hadn’t found any actual evidence of that. Yet.

They were led down a cramped passage to a room where, on the other side of a one-way mirror, they could see Strucker already in place, sitting shackled to a metal table.

“As you can see, our man is already waiting for you. He’s been in there about three hours, so I’m sure he’ll be eager to talk.”

Nat and Clint exchanged wordless glances as Steve’s posture changed slightly—they could both tell he was weighing up whether to say something about the conditions.

“I’ll be conducting the interview,” Nat said, cutting in before he could. Steve glanced sideways at her, looking a little disappointed that she’d deliberately headed him off.

Zemo seemed unphased. “Of course. I am here as an observer only—you are free to question Strucker as you wish.”

Clint looked at her and nodded. “We’ll observe.”

Zemo gestured and a Sokovian guard escorted Nat back out and around to the entrance of the cell. She stepped through the door and it was closed again behind her.

“Ms Romanov, what a pleasure to see you again.”

Strucker was a dime a dozen as far as these things were concerned—the sort of brittle-egoed man who always had to be the cleverest person in the room. There were two main ways to deal with them: in a more delicate setting where offending them was a risk, it was better to play into their vanity and make them slip up by underestimating you, like she had with Loki. When you held all the cards, however, casually disabusing them of their ego while they had no real way of retaliating would often make them break down.

“I’ll make this quick, Strucker,” Natasha said brusquely as she sat down across from him. “I imagine you’re about as thrilled to see me as I am to see you. Don’t worry, neither of us will be here long.”

He paused, taken slightly aback by the abruptness, then nodded. “Very well, to business then.”

“Your successful experiments. The Maximoffs. Do you know where they went?”

Strucker smiled at the question, settling into the predicted ‘smartest man in the room’ routine. “Slipped the net, did they? That is a shame. But you must be rather desperate to find them, if you’re resorting to speaking to me, no? Why would that be?”

Natasha paused, gauging the risks. She didn’t want to speak too openly about Loki’s sceptre, not with Sokovian intelligence hovering in the background, but from the way he was needling her she was pretty sure that Strucker either already knew or had guessed that the twins had the artifact. She sat back in her chair, a small smile curving her lips. “Why do you think I’m here?” she asked, letting a casual but measured confidence leak into her voice.

He leaned forward, responding to her body language as he peered eagerly at her over the table. “They have it, don’t they? The sceptre.”

“Do you know what they’re planning?”

Strucker smiled broadly. “Ms Romanov, I would be happy to cooperate with your interrogation, but first I would need something from you.”

Natasha raised an eyebrow. “Such as?”

“They intend to try me in the Hague. The International Criminal Court.”

“Illegal human experimentation will do that, yes,” she said, a small, vicious smile curling the corner of her mouth.

Strucker scowled in response. “I would like a formal statement from the Avengers, outlining my nonviolent surrender and willingness to cooperate with authorities, to be entered as evidence as to my character.”

Natasha leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands, making unblinking eye contact. “You have no idea where they are, do you?” she said after a few moments of silence, her tone light and mocking.

Strucker was easy to read. If he had any real information to share, he would have tried playing with her a bit longer, dragging things out with a bit of light taunting, rather than rushing straight to grabbing whatever benefits he could. He was a coward, far too focused on securing whatever he possibly could before it became too obvious that he couldn’t help them. Natasha could practically see the wheels turning in his head as he decided whether to risk bluffing or outright lying to her.

“I have some ideas,” he hedged. Another mistake on his part. “I’m sure that with my help—”

“Sorry for wasting your time,” Natasha stood back up, dusted off her hands and started toward the door. “Enjoy the Netherlands.”

“Wait!” Strucker blurted out, an edge of panic in his voice. “I know things! I could be useful!”

She paused at the door, looking back at him with a bored expression. “If you can tell me something useful within the next five seconds, I’ll consider it.”

“I… but…” he spluttered for a moment before falling silent, shoulders slumped.

Natasha nodded, more to herself than to him. “We won’t be seeing each other again.”

She knocked on the door twice, stepping through once the Sokovian guards opened it and leaving Strucker to stew in his own impotence. A few moments later, she was back in the room with Steve, Clint and Zemo. “He doesn’t know anything.”

“That interrogation was… unusually swift,” Zemo asked, eyeing her curiously.

“What can I say? I’m efficient.”

Steve’s brow furrowed but he nodded, trusting Nat’s assessment. “Alright. We’re done here, then.” He turned to the Sokovian official. “Thanks again for facilitating this, we really do appreciate your government’s cooperation.”

Zemo inclined his head in acknowledgement, smiling congenially. “If I may, Captain Rogers, perhaps we could share information? The Enhanced—the Maximoff twins—they are Sokovian citizens, after all. Our government would be happy to coordinate with the Avengers in order to bring them in.”

“We’ll review and get back to you,” Natasha interjected smoothly. “If you’ll excuse us, we have to report back to our team.”

He nodded, with only the slightest suggestion of annoyance or disappointment. “Of course. Please, if there is anything else I can do to assist, let me know.”

The three of them were quiet as they were escorted back out of the Sokovian prison to where the Quinjet sat parked just outside the tall, barbed-wire-topped fences. Once they were safely in the air, Steve leaned forward in his seat and opened a secure channel to Avengers Tower. “Steve here. We’re coming home.”

A few seconds later, the connection went live again and Tony Stark’s voice filtered into the cabin. “Hey Cap, how’d it go?”

“Oh hey, Tony. Surprised you’re awake.”

“Huh, is that the time? I’ve been working with Bruce and we lost track. So what did our HYDRA commander have to say?”

“Nothing useful.”

“Quelle surprise. You know, I’m getting pretty sick of HYDRA making us chase our tails.”

“The trip wasn’t a total waste of time,” Clint interjected. “The Maximoffs aren’t acting on HYDRA’s orders.”

“They’re off the reservation? Oh, well, that’s even better.”

Nat caught Clint’s attention, rolling her eyes at Tony’s comment. “If the Maximoffs have struck out on their own, it narrows things down for us,” she said. "They’ll be working with limited resources, which means they’ll be easier to find.”

“Speaking of, any luck getting the tracking algorithm up and running?” Steve asked. With the assumption that the sceptre was no longer hidden away in a heavily shielded lab, Bruce and Tony had dusted off and refined the old tracking algorithm they’d originally tried to use to narrow down where Loki had hidden the Tesseract back when he was hiding on Earth.

Tony snorted. “Yeah, actually. Turns out if world-renowned scientist Dr Bruce Banner calls up your lab and asks you to please put your spectrometer on the roof and calibrate it to scan for gamma radiation, most people will just go ahead and do it.”

“Some people,” Bruce chimed in, correcting him. “Not everyone’s keen to collaborate with us. The net has a lot of holes in it, so we’re probably not going to get a positive match for the sceptre’s signature, but this will at least let us rule some places out.”

Steve nodded. “Good. I’d like to find them before they’re ready for us. The world’s a big place. Let’s start making it smaller.”

 

--

 

I sighed despondently, trying and failing to will myself out of bed. I’d been awake for a good hour or so already, but was finding it incredibly difficult to find the motivation to face the day. The muffled sounds of car horns blaring and undifferentiated hubbub of people in the city outside had already reached a peak despite the early hour, in sharp contrast to the softly snoring Pietro, who had slept like a log and seemed completely at peace with the world.

I envied him and his ignorance of just how badly we’d fucked up yesterday. We’d abandoned Kathmandu quickly after the altercation with the Ancient One, fleeing west across the border into India and not stopping until we reached New Delhi. I’d basically just collapsed once we secured a room, reasoning that I wanted to be well-rested before tackling the sceptre rather than running on fumes, but had tossed and turned all night, my mind running over all the things I could have done differently.

I’d decided I wanted to make things better—to use my foreknowledge to prevent some of the worst events of the original timeline from happening. And on my very first outing, my first real attempt to actually do something, I’d hospitalised the Ancient One and made an enemy of Kamar‑taj. I felt like shit.

I glanced over at the sling ring lying on the bedside table. While I knew I had to deal with the sceptre first, and could probably do with another day or two resting before I really tried experimenting with it, I’d already taken a preliminary look at the ring and was pretty surprised what I’d found. Exploratory tendrils of chaos magic had revealed that the piece that sat across the top of your fingers when wearing it—what I’d initially taken to be a solid bar of metal—actually had some internal layering going on, condensing a huge number of complex inscriptions into a much smaller package.

It was an impressive, complicated piece of work. At this stage, my best guess was that it was used to vastly simplify the process of creating a portal—you channelled energy through the complicated spellwork and it ‘automatically’ cast it. That fit with the Ancient One’s characterisation of spells as programs, with the ring acting as a sort of pre-programmed executable that just needed to be run. It also implied that it was possible, if potentially difficult, to create a portal without a ring.

Thinking about the ring reminded me again about how we’d gotten it. Slipping my pillow out from under my head, I put it over my face to muffle my despairing groan. After a few more minutes, I reluctantly sat up. Glancing over at Pietro, still sleeping peacefully in the room’s other bed, I looked back down at the pillow in my hand for a moment before throwing it at him as hard as I could.

The indignant squawk of surprise as he was shocked back into consciousness brought a small smile of satisfaction to my face. “Wanda, what the fuck?” he grumbled.

“Your face was annoying me.” I swung my legs over the side of my bed and stood up, stretching my arms over my head. “Come on, get out of bed. We’ll get some breakfast and then I’ll take care of the sceptre.”

We got dressed, ducked out to gorge ourselves on idli and dosa at a nearby café, and about an hour later had returned to our hotel. The room we’d gotten was relatively nice—it wasn’t going to win any awards, and it was half the size of the room we’d been staying in in Kathmandu, but the décor was a step up, the beds were somehow even comfier, and the Wi-Fi was rock solid. Not much else I could have asked for, except for some actual space to move around.

As well as the beds and shared bedside table, there was a TV mounted to the wall and, a tiny, cramped desk with a single wicker chair. Pietro had pulled out the chair and was sitting on it backwards, looking at me. I’d retrieved the sceptre, temporarily dropping it on my bed as I psyched myself up to examine it. I was a little bit worried that it would have some additional defences built in—nothing like that had shown up in the original timeline but, then again, no one had probed it telepathically with magic until it was already embedded in Vision’s head.

Pietro frowned. “Explain something to me. You don’t want to use the sceptre to control people’s minds, yes? But you still tried to use your own magic on the Ancient One?”

“It’s not that simple,” I said, shaking my head. “I don’t particularly like messing with people’s minds, but I’ll do it if I have to. The sceptre’s different because it’s compromised. It lets you control others, yes, but it also affects your own mind. Even just being near it can cause you to act differently.”

“You’ve said that before,” Pietro said slowly. “So why did we take it if we don’t want to use it?”

Picking up the sceptre, I pointed to the glimmering blue jewel set into the bladed head. “This gem isn’t the actual power source. There’s another hidden inside. The blue one is an interface wrapped around it, containing it, drawing out its power in a controlled way. It’s also, I think, deliberately designed to affect those using it. That’s what I wanted to talk to the Ancient One about—she has access to a similar artifact, and I’d hoped we could extract the real power from inside together.”

“Well, so much for that plan.”

“I know.” I sighed. “Which means I have to do this myself. Now. The sceptre’s already been affecting me. It might have been affecting you as well. I don’t want to risk not noticing the next time it makes me go all… megalomaniacal.”

Sitting down cross-legged at the foot of our beds, I placed the sceptre on the carpet in front of me and stared at it for a few moments. Annoyingly, this meant I was probably never going to get a proper answer for something that had been bugging me for quite some time: I still had no idea why the Mind Stone gave Pietro powers at all. Dozens of people died in List’s experiments with the sceptre, with only the two of us emerging alive and enhanced. For Wanda, it seemed simple enough to explain—she was the destined Scarlet Witch, and a natural wellspring of magical power. The Mind Stone reacted with that, helping to unlock and supercharge the magical potential that was already there. But there was nothing special about Pietro, was there?

I had two working theories. One possibility was that Pietro had been affected by his close proximity to Wanda over the years, with that being just enough to have done something to him that made him receptive to the stone’s influence. The second scenario, which seemed more likely, was that Wanda herself had shielded him somehow, albeit unconsciously. The Mind Stone might not have even given him his powers at all—maybe Wanda did. Her abilities could alter reality, and there were other examples of her unconsciously or accidentally giving people powers. When Wanda had taken over Westview in the original timeline, exposure to her Hex was what caused Monica Rambeau to develop her abilities, and she’d even granted Pietro’s actual superspeed to Ralph Bohner, at least temporarily.

Either way, seeing if I could deliberately induce powers in someone else, rather than it just being an unintended or subconscious side effect, was definitely on my list of things to try once I had the time and space to experiment.

“So…?” Pietro interrupted my thoughts, looking down at me from his perch on the chair.

I put a finger to my lips to shush him and he rolled his eyes. Ignoring him, I focused instead on the sceptre lying in front of me, wisps of red energy shimmering around it as I reach out with my power. Awareness bloomed in my mind immediately as I made telepathic contact—there was definitely a mind inside the gem, though it was dormant. Slumbering dreamlessly. There was no doubt in my mind that, in the original timeline, this was what would have become Ultron. Not part of the Mind Stone, but rather a watchdog that had been set to guard it. A failsafe, likely created by Thanos.

Raising my hand, I caused the sceptre to float into the air, small movements of my fingers causing it to rotate lazily in front of my face and letting me inspect it more fully. It looked like the blue gem wasn’t just placed like a jewel in a setting, but was more like a glass bauble that had had a rod inserted into it while it had been molten, effectively sealing it in place.

I wrapped the gem in telekinetic force, covering the entire surface of it until not a hint of blue remained visible, then started to apply pressure from two sides. There was a reaction almost immediately, the mind inside the gem startled into awareness. I increased the pressure rapidly as it flailed around, disoriented, trying to understand what was happening to it. Weakly, it interfaced with the Mind Stone and tried to attack me back, sending a spike of mental feedback towards me. It was even more inexperienced with mental attacks than I was—if it had time to get its bearings it might have been a problem, but as it was I just battered it aside with brute force. I took a deep, slightly unsteady breath as I continued to increase the pressure, layering on even more of my power.

It felt… small. Scared. It must be terrifying, being woken up only to find something was already killing you, something that you didn’t have time to properly understand or defend yourself against. Even knowing what it was or could become, this didn’t feel heroic or good. At least if it had put up more of a fight, I would have been able to feel a bit more justified. But this was like pushing a pillow down on the face of an elderly person or small child—someone who wasn’t capable of fighting back properly—and just holding them down as I smothered them to death. I felt sick, tears starting to prick the corners of my eyes.

“Wanda?” Pietro straightened up, concern in his tone.

There was a cracking sound as the gem shattered and I gasped, flinching back as I felt the mind die. The sceptre fell from my telekinetic grasp, dropping to the carpet. Left floating in mid-air—seemingly unconcerned with gravity even though I was no longer touching it with my magic at all—was a brightly-shining gem, radiant with golden power. The Mind Stone.

Without really thinking about it, I held out a trembling hand and the stone floated down, landing in my palm as gently as a feather. It felt light, almost insubstantial. I closed my fist around it, then gagged, my gorge rising in my throat.

Pietro was next to me instantly, strong hands lifting me to my feet and helping me to stagger the few steps to the room’s ensuite so I could put my head over the toilet bowl as I threw up. I hugged the bowl, noisily and messily emptying the contents of my stomach as I sniffed and blinked away the tears that clouded my vision. Pietro stayed with me, murmuring soothing words, one hand expertly holding my hair out of the way and the other gently rubbing my back as I heaved and retched violently.