Chapter 4
The sun almost blinds her as Wanda steps out of the portal and into the daylight. She closes her eyes against the glare without a second thought and lifts a hand to add an additional layer of protection, her face scrunching up in discomfort as black spots dance across the inside of her eyelids. A gentle breeze wafts around her, bringing the scents and smells of the world around her - exhaust fumes, smoke from fire, wet dirt, dewy grass, rain lingering in the air - directly to her nose.
“Wanda? Is that you?”
Wanda forces her eyes to open, squinting awkwardly against the light as she tries to pick out the owner of the voice. A familiar face comes into view, and Wanda smiles. “Hello, Monica.”
The tension leaves Monica’s body, her shoulders sagging several centimetres in relief, and she returns Wanda’s smile. “Hi. I see you decided to finally join us back here on Earth.”
“How long have I been gone?”
“Thirty-seven days.”
“Where are Agatha and Irena?”
“At the Sanctum Sanctorum in New York. The twins are there too.”
Wanda nods with a sigh, relieved. “Good, good,” she says, lowering her hand to her side and flexing her fingers. “Do you need me for anything, or can I go be with my family?”
Monica looks her up and down. “I’d like for you to be checked over by one of our medics before you head down to New York, just to be safe.”
Wanda agrees, silently praying that it’ll be quick.
Wanda’s frustrated agitation at being forced to move at everyone else’s pace for the forseeable future hangs heavy and oppressive across the camp, even when they’re out in the open air. The pulsating glow of the magic coiling like a weapon around her fingers and the dangerous glint in her eyes does little to ease the sense that she’s a ticking time bomb, just waiting to go off in the event that she decides she’s finally had enough of playing their games.
No one meets Wanda’s eye as they scurry back and forth, loading up the back of the truck with various containers in a variety of different shapes and sizes. Their eyes become stubbornly fixed to the floor beneath their feet whenever they get even remotely close to where she stands at the truck’s passenger side door - watching, waiting and counting down the seconds until the instant that they can leave for New York.
Raised voices drift over to Wanda on the wind, carried over to her from the entrance of a large tent near the middle of the camp that seems to serve as something akin to ‘war room’. There’s a rattle of rickety, collapsible tables colliding against each other as someone slams their fist down onto one of them, thus disturbing the already precarious set up even further. The loud noises cease almost as soon as they’ve begun, with long moments passing before Monica walks out of the tent, her shoulders slumped in apparent defeat.
She approaches Wanda with a regretful expression on her face. Wanda’s eyes flare red and threatening as she draws closer, and she finds herself stopping short. “Things have . . . developed,” she admits quietly. “We can’t go to New York.”
Wanda’s nostrils flare, and her lips flatten into a hard, unforgiving line as she returns Monica’s gaze with a hardened stare of her own. “You can’t go to New York, you mean.”
Monica shakes her head. “No, I mean it when I say ‘we’.” She’s reluctant to share the information she’s just received, but the progress made by their targets mean that they can no longer keep Wanda - and by extension, Agatha - in the dark. “You’re aware that we’re interested in Nicholas Scratch?”
Wanda nods. “He’s the one in charge of New Salem - I think?”
“He is. He also appears to be working for Dormmamu, and we’re currently trying to verify intel that he may have sacrificed the pocket dimension that New Salem exists within to the Dark Dimension.”
Wanda frowns. “Why would he do that? He doesn’t seem like the type that would give up any slice of power that he might have.”
Monica shrugs with a confused shake of her head. “We can’t currently speculate as to his motives or goals. We have, however, been able to establish that portal in Lynn Woods no longer leads to New Salem, and was likely commandered as an entrance to the Dark Dimension by Scratch, with help and guidance from Dormmamu.”
“We were intentionally sent to the Dark Dimension?!”
“Not us specifically. It appears to be a permanent change that would send anyone who attempts to use the portal there, regardless of their identity.”
“Okay,” Wanda says with a slow nod of accession. Her unease at the proffered knowledge is only growing with every passing bit of information that she’s coming to acquire. “I don’t see what any of this has got to do with New York.”
Monica bites down nervously on her bottom lip. “Our forces in New York appear to have been infiltrated by Scratch’s forces, and there’s a chance our forces here have been too.”
Fear coils cold and tight around Wanda’s lungs.
A hand taps at Agatha’s shoulder. She looks up and back, sees Darcy standing behind her, a folded up note in hand. She takes the note held out to her, watches silently as Darcy turns and walks away, back towards her wall of computer monitors where it’s grown in size and complexity to overtake the entire table it’s been set up on.
She frowns at Darcy’s back, confused. She’s never really had much of a relationship with Darcy, but even she knows that this behaviour is strange. Her fingers flex anxiously around the note, wondering what could possibly be so sensitive as to require a handwritten note.
“What does it say?!” Tommy’s eager voice draws her attention back to the situation at hand. Three pairs of curious eyes stare at her, waiting for her to open up, read and share the contents of the piece of paper clasped between her fingertips. Her eyes dart around the room, the sense of being watched making the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. There’s no immediate sign of observation, with all those that she can see being apparently absorbed in their current task.
They’re in a library though, so there are more than just a few places to hide and observe someone from without being obvious about it. She licks her lips, nostrils flaring as she reaches deep within herself to where she can feel her magic, small and weak and helpless inside the little bubble it’s created for itself as a form of protection while it regains its strength and grows in power. She cups imaginary hands around this little bubble with a tenderness that she’s only ever used with three other beings before, pale lips moving almost inperceptibly around silent words.
Please, she whispers to the magic, help me keep this safe.
In answer, the little ball pulses bright and blue-white, filling her with the kind of all-encompassing sense of home and warmth that she’s forgotten that magic can have. Distantly, she wonders what could have possibly drawn her away from such a wonderful feeling. A dark, ugly voice - it sounds a little bit too much like her mother’s for her liking - arises from depths of her mind with an answer, growing louder with every repetition that it makes of that answer - you wanted control, Agatha, because to have control means you’ll never be hurt, nor lose the things you hold close to your heart.
The little ball begins to shrink and die, the feelings it’s generating retreating against the voice’s onslaught. Her lids slide closed over her eyes from the briefest of moments, and, instead of giving in to the voice and the things that she knows it’ll ask her of her, she answers. No, she tells the voice, control doesn’t mean that I’ll never suffer those things. It just makes them worse when they do happen, because it’ll be my fault instead of someone else’s.
With a flicker of her eyelids, she breathes the fear out of her body, and with it, the voice. In its place the little ball of magic flares back into being, expanding to completely fill her mind, seeking out every crack and crevice that the darkness may seek to grasp onto. She lets herself feel it all, lets herself remember what it means to be able to give an answer to the question of what an emotion is, what it feels like, what it means.
She feels her love - for Wanda, for Irena - and the early stages of what may be love for the two boys that sit on the carpeted floor of the Sanctum Sanctorum’s library before her. She feels her anxiety about their safety, their health and well-being, their future. But most of all, she feels her fear - her fear that she’d just been a means to an end, a way for Wanda to get back to the family she’d so desperately been trying to create for herself back when they first met.
Her fear that, now that the boys have been given another chance at life - she couldn’t even begin to speculate as to the hows or the whys of that particular feat - Wanda will leave, will go out in search of Vision, will leave her behind and take Irena with her. Tears burn against the backs of her eyes and threaten to coalesce along the edges of her lids. An iron band begins to close around her chest, but she forces it away, sucking in a deep, hesitant breath that calms her racing heart, soothes her fraying nerves, and quiets the fearful rushing of blood that’s been pounding relentlessly against her eardrums for the past few seconds.
Whatever she’s done, it seems to have worked. Something passes unseen through her skin, expanding outwards from a long forgotten place deep within her that’s remained cold and alone and untouched for the past few centuries. This thing, whatever it is, settles with an almost imperceptible shimmer around the small, circular huddle of four that she’s found herself in. She shivers, the presence of magic - of witchcraft, more specifically her witchcraft - sitting a little strange against the exposed skin of her forearms.
Billy frowns at her, brow furrowing over a wrinkled nose in an expression that’s so reminiscent of Wanda that it makes her heart ache. “What did you do?” he asks, a little suspicious.
Agatha attempts to make it look like she’s not glancing over the barrier that surrounds them like a dome of barely there magic for the first time, letting herself feel it in all its glory. “It’s harmless,” she assures them, though it’s obvious that they don’t believe her. “It’s just a simple sound distortion spell that’ll prevent anyone from listening in on us. They’ll hear something mundane and incongruous, irrespective of what it is that we actually say to each other.”
Irena gurgles around the gel ring, the only one of the three young faces that isn’t currently frowning at her. “Is that really necessary?” Billy asks.
Agatha sighs, eyes darting across the room to where Darcy sits, working away at her wall of technology. “We’re about to find out,” she says, and begins to unfold the note.