The man on the street asks for her name.
Wanda Maximoff, she answers.
He tells her it's quite a pretty name, and it is. She smiles. It always has been.
Pretty even when written in chicken-scratch Cyrillic on her birth certificate and those foster home papers she never learnt how to fill. Pretty on school assignments and labels for the two boxes that held the small sum of her worldly possessions. It’s too pretty a name to have had every written record of it burnt to ashes before she had even turned thirteen.
Thirteen; Wanda's a pretty name, but thirteen’s not a pretty age. Her sitcoms told her that much—thirteen is the awkward, gangly middle child who has to learn to fend for herself, who has to look out for everyone and bridge every gap because nobody else will. She is thirteen now, but she didn’t used to be: at seven, she’d been her parents’ malyshka, their darling girl. Every good mark she brought home from school warranted the most special dinner they could afford, and every freshly-learnt fact out of her mouth would have them all looking at her like she hung the moon and the stars.
She hasn't seen that look since the man from the street took them; she hasn't seen the moon and the stars since he introduced himself as Strucker. She sees a different look in her brother’s eyes whenever they pass each other in the halls; it says, You’re still alive. She looks back; We will get out one day.
She isn’t seven anymore, no longer precious and pretty, and instead the forgotten thirteen bound to a life in the shadows. In SHIELD—in Hydra— she is one of the older kids: the ones that Strucker left to rot in their cells until he’s gone through all of the little ones already. Hydra has them all: the old spares, the young spares, every defenceless spare in Sokovia. Strucker took her and her brother from the streets at thirteen and locked them up with the rest of the forgotten thirteens.
Then four months and far too many experiments in, she and Pietro are the only survivors. They drag themselves through the days, desperate to prove their worth and be useful so that they might earn just a small peek outside every now and then. But as Strucker would have it, even then, they are still spares; just as expendable as the next batch of Ex-Sevens he’ll lie to.
That is until Wanda Maximoff turns fourteen. Until she touches an Infinity Stone and survives, which doesn’t feel like much of an achievement until Strucker deems it to be: a hand on her cheek, a touch not meant to hurt, and she is no longer just a spare. She’d thought it to be a good thing, at first. But Strucker is the filthiest liar she’s ever met—the Infinity Stone is nothing compared to the sudden surge of experiments she is subjected to, and the days turn into a blur of agony. And eventually, Wanda Maximoff, now called The Anomaly, with the red eyes and red veins and red powers she cannot control—can no longer trap the pain inside her body, and there is an explosion that engulfs the south side of the fortress in red.
People die. Pietro nearly does.
And that is how Wanda Maximoff, at fourteen, is dragged by the steel collar around her neck and locked in her own tiny cell to rot in complete isolation. Her powers simply bounce off the walls, and every burst of red swallows her whole before rushing violently back into her small body. Every time, she is knocked out cold and time is a myth. She goes numb to survive, but she can still feel Pietro in her head. The flickers keep her alive.
She manages to hear through a guard’s ears once; it’s quiet and distorted, but she perks up at the mention of the Maximoff boy: he’d broken a bunch of bones from running full speed into the wall of her cell. She tries to ask him why. His answer still comes in flickers: he was trying to phase through and see her again.
At some point, Wanda Maximoff turns seventeen—if she’s learnt anything from her sitcoms, seventeen is supposed to be the good age when good things are finally supposed to happen, but they don’t. Or maybe they do; she sees a butterfly in her cell once, but she can’t be sure when. She might’ve just imagined it. She isn’t even sure when she turned seventeen; every record of her birth is long gone and gone forever, along with any concept of time she’s ever had, since her parents’ death. She knows that her birthday is somewhere around February, near the end of winter—not that she can tell what time of year it is anyway, because one: the cells, while terrible in every other way, are at least warm enough to keep them alive, two: the cells have no windows, and three: the Hydra base is on a mountain, and at least in Sokovia, mountains always have those big, snowy ice caps on top. February seems to last all year.
She’d drawn a mountain once for school. Her name had been written in the corner. It’s gone now, lost in the fire, because whatever her name touches is already gone. Everything her name touches, burns.
So Wanda Maximoff is not surprised when, at eighteen, she realises that the only thing she will ever be useful for is destruction. It’s her ‘Good Job!’ sticker-worthy talent; Sokovia is gone. Pietro is gone. Everything else will be gone soon, like the two little boxes full of clothes and DVDs and pictures; like Irina Maximoff, Oleg Maximoff, Pietro Maximoff. All dead, gone, and burnt, and Wanda Maximoff remains. She doesn’t plan to for much longer.
And Wanda Maximoff is not surprised when, at nineteen, she makes a mistake, and little by little, her destiny continues to reveal itself. A building is not quite as large as a nation, not like Sokovia, but it doesn't stop at just a building; no, to end the Avengers is to bring about the end of the world. These days, one cannot exist without the other, and both crumble at the mention of her name. Wanda Maximoff the Terrorist submits to the guards as soon as they’re in sight; hands beside her head, on her knees, just like her Papa taught her to do if the soldiers ever tried to take her away. This is the same; just another war, just more things she’s done wrong, and the reasons for Stark to call her a weapon only multiply. So they slip her into a straitjacket and lock a shock collar around her neck, and she doesn’t protest. They’re afraid of her; they all are, and there is some sick comfort in knowing that even then, they will never be as afraid as she is.
But monsters are still monsters, and they exist whether or not you check under the bed or through the crack between closet doors. There will always be faces behind the missiles; it just depends on which side you’re looking from.
In short, Stark was always right about her.
And Wanda Maximoff is twenty-one when her realisation becomes clearer: she is meant for nothing but destruction—destruction, and tragedy. They are twins; they come hand in hand, you see, as twins do. But they do not leave hand in hand, as twins do. They never leave. Not Wanda, at least, because she is inextricably tied to each of them; tangled and twisted within her fate; she feeds destruction as tragedy feeds on her—two absolutes she’s been made to bridge together, regardless of what they take from her, regardless of how they bleed her dry, because no matter what, no matter who, she is meant to lose everything she’s ever known. It clicks in her head the moment Vision’s own cracks and he is gone. He’d said, I just feel you—
You, you: Wanda Maximoff, the cursed, the damned, the burdened. The burden. The one Vision had carried until the last time he spoke, a fractured I love you, and died along with that final, cursed word on his lips. Everything her name touches…
Wanda Maximoff is twenty-one and five when she realises that that means herself, too.
Herself and everything she has created. Every extension of her being—Vision, her boys, her life in Westview. Because it’s a simple fact: Wanda Maximoff is a wicked thing, and creation is not for the wicked. Every good thing she does means nothing with a fate like hers. She understands it, sure, yet she does not accept it and never will. But it’s an eye for an eye, a leg for a leg; she creates a life she was not meant to live, and when the black begins to creep up her fingers and every mirror becomes a liar, she knows that Wanda Maximoff is the final price she must pay.
Wanda Maximoff is too pretty a name to be forgotten, too pretty to be lost. But Wanda Maximoff is now nothing if not lost, because in the face of destruction and tragedy, she will always be the child behind the missile, hiding under the bed. The irony tastes like blood in her mouth.
But it’s different this time—to everyone else, she is a nuclear missile. Not a single living witness to her pain; no Pietro, no Vision, no family. You live as long as you are loved, the saying goes, so Wanda Maximoff hasn’t been alive in a long time. She’d brought about the end of her world long before she did the end of everyone else’s.
Mount Wundagore comes crashing down on her and she thinks she should’ve used her old steel collar as a noose long before she could fulfill her destiny. She destroys the Darkhold and herself with it; there’s no good left in her to survive. She’s not sure there ever was.
So maybe it’s a good thing nobody looks for Wanda Maximoff’s remains buried under Wundagore, because all they might find is a body, mangled and monstrous to match the inside. Instead, the records of Wundagore are wiped from existence; every mention of it magicked into the void, as if to cleanse the world from its corruption.
When Wanda Maximoff dies, her name dies with her. it is never spoken again; the ones who know believe she died too wicked to be mourned. It doesn’t matter that she never wanted to, that wickedness was the curse of her birth, that she’d fought against it for as long as she could—that knowledge died with her, too, and with all those who died before her. What a life: ultimately, it was Wanda Maximoff’s heart that was her downfall, not her name.