the dead neighbour incident
“This is not good. This is not fucking good.” Wanda said, running her hands through her ginger hair.
The boys stood beside her, not commenting on her cussing, just staring at the corpse on the floor with equally wide eyes.
Yup, there was a dead woman lying on Wanda’s floor. And who had killed her? None other than Wanda herself.
Of course she hadn’t meant to kill her. Her neighbour Cheryl Simone had come in to share some of her pumpkin pie with the Maximoffs, and Wanda had welcomed her and let her sit down at the table. They gossiped about their other neighbours and talked about how Cheryl had made the pie for her husband's birthday yesterday, but she'd made way too much. Then things got ugly.
Cheryl asked how Wanda had met Vision. She made up a random lie, but Cheryl saw right through her. She asked more and more questions, and when Wanda lost her temper and yelled at her to stop being so nosy, she asked that dreaded question:
“Is Vision even willing to be with you, or are you somehow forcing this onto him?”
Wanda had just seen red, because that wasn’t true! Despite the secrets she was hiding, it just wasn’t true!
She shot a beam of power forward before she could think. She was still blinded with anger, so she couldn’t see Cheryl’s last moments of life. When she’d calmed down a bit, the other woman was a snow-white corpse with her blue eyes still bugging out in astonishment.
Then Billy and Tommy came rushing in. She probably should’ve hidden the body from their view, but she herself was in shock.
“I-- she was-- there was--” Wanda ended up just covering her mouth speechlessly.
“Mom, you killed her. What’s going to happen to you?” Billy asked. “To us?”
“Nothing will happen.” Wanda said firmly.
Her shock and horror was replaced by determination not to let anyone or anything touch her family. She promised herself she would protect them, and now she will fulfill that promise.
“I’ll make sure nothing happens, boys.”
She summoned scarlett red magic into her hands. Twisting and reshaping Westview’s reality, she made the corpse on her floor dissolve into nothing. She wiped her children's minds of the traumatizing incident, made them think they came into the kitchen just because they smelled a pie in there.
She wiped Cheryl Simone from everyone’s memories, made her face disappear from all photos, and made her name disappear from all records.
There.
Everything was fixed now, and Wanda exhaled in relief. That’s when Vision opened the front door and entered the house, still wearing his human face disguise.
“I’m back! Wanda, what is-- what’s going on?”
“Uh, I made you guys some pie.” She picked the pie off the table and presented it to him with a wide grin.
Vision blinked at her silently. For a moment she thought he would call her out for lying and demand what was really going on. But then the twins started jumping up and down at the mention of pie, and he smiled at their cuteness, and the subject was quickly forgotten.
As Wanda crawled into bed with her husband that night, she realized what today’s incident meant. She had gotten away with murder (and this time without any of the other Avengers’ help). All because of her crafted reality. She couldn't help wondering: what else could she get up to in this dream bubble?