“Wanda,” she calls.
The witch doesn’t respond. She swings her legs back and forth, the backs of her sneakers bouncing off of the brick. The thin February air phases through her sweatshirt to bring the goosebumps out from under her skin. She’s gotten more sensitive to the cold since coming to America. And to think she and Pietro would survive in the dirty winter streets.
“Wanda.”
She watches them through the window from her perch, all the children passing by. Whining, laughing, playing, learning. She’s never taken the time to consider who’s more noisy between them and adults. The elders take the cake for the quietest minds, all exhausted from their many years of life. Young children are endless batteries of thoughts, powered by imagination and curiosity. And adults concern themselves with so many things, even the dullest ones. They have plans to be made and people to worry about and deadlines to hit. Teenagers are almost just as bad.
The shallow glimpses of their minds are child’s play in comparison (to a rising city, to an innocent town). She doesn’t try to look any deeper than that. She wishes not to make that kind of mistake again. And should she be so...reckless (selfish) again, there are consequences.
“Wa—”
“I can hear you, Director,” Wanda rasps. “You don’t have to keep calling like I’m one of your dogs.”
Monica sighs and checks her watch. Five minutes to three. She approaches slowly, calming her mind as boot heels click against concrete. “When we got the alert, it took a lot for me to convince the council not to send out a squad y’know.”
“They should know by now that I’m harmless.”
Monica has to snort at that. “Harmless” isn’t exactly what got them in this situation in the first place.
She gingerly sets herself on the ledge, hands clasped between her knees. It’s funny how those habits stick even when you’re no longer afraid of falling. Wanda doesn’t even flinch, watching the school doors like a hawk.
“I just wanted to see them.”
Monica bites her lip, swallowing thickly. “I know.”
The bell rings. A swarm of teens rush out of the building at various speeds, some stopping to talk to their friends, others nearly sprinting to their cars. Two boys walk out side by side, seemingly unaware of their synchronicity. One in a red hoodie and jeans, a blue beanie covering a head of thick dark hair. The other wears a school-issued tracksuit, jade green with the jacket unzipped. His hair is solid, startling shade of silver. Wanda watches her sons, tries not to let her heart grow too light when they brush hands and exchange a glance before going their separate ways, Billy to a blue minivan parked halfway down the street as Tommy starts down the sidewalk in the opposite direction, hands in his pockets. “Who are they, now?” she asks.
“Thomas Shepherd and William Kaplan. Tommy’s the only child in a two parent household a little further out of town, Billy lives in the suburbs and the couple has two younger boys. They’re both being generously compensated.”
“Compensated?” Wanda turns towards her with furrowed brows, scarlet flashing in the murky brown of her eyes. “You’re paying them to take care of my children?”
“We’re paying them for confidentiality,” Monica corrects. “And to be our eyes and ears in case anything unusual pops up. If Billy starts making things float through the air, we’re the first people they tell and not the neighbors during book club.”
“And why hasn’t it?”
Monica frowns, turning towards her with a silent question. She rephrases, “Why hasn’t anything unusual happened?”
The loud chatter of the other kids starts to dissipate, more and more discomfort seeping into the other woman’s silence. “We have reason to believe that when you brought them back, you...projected on them a little bit,” she says. She speaks clearly, like she’s doing a debrief instead of talking to an unstable superpowered refugee. “They don’t remember anything from Westview. Not that they have powers, not that they weren’t even born six months ago, not that—“
“Not that I’m their mother,” Wanda breathes, and purses her lips. She blocks out Monica’s sympathy the moment it appears.
“It’s possible that if they’re confronted with something from the anomaly that their memories will start to come back, but until then they’re just,” the director shrugs, “two normal kids, I guess. We worked together with the parents to provide background stories.”
“Tommy has white hair.”
“He dyed it.”
Wanda bites her lip as her sons’ minds get further and further away. Billy ponders asking his mom (she ignores the way her chest starts to ache) if they can stop by the comic store before heading home. Tommy wonders (bitterly, she notes) if he’ll have to make his own dinner tonight (and she herself wonders if he remembers any of the recipes she taught them in their short time together. But if muscle memory was retained, he would be home in seconds instead of half an hour. Billy would have glanced up at her perch at least once by now. It’s for this very reason that she’s keeping her mind unshielded.)
“Is that why you don’t want me coming too close to them?” She asks, then bites her cheek. The metallic taste grows as their presence fades. Monica is silent, but it’s enough of an answer for her. “They deserve to know who they really are. They deserve…” To be with me, she wants to say. Doesn’t, in a paltry hope that SWORD won’t jump the gun and think she’s planning something. Because do they really deserve that after what she did? Does she really deserve them ?
It’s funny really. In creating a safe world for her sons (in creating her sons themselves), she had simultaneously given up her right to have them.
“Wanda…” Monica sighs. It reminds her of her mother (memories so abruptly, violently dredged up from the fog she had kept them under), scolding her and Pietro for whatever trouble they’d gotten into this time. Mostly running scams on the neighbors, or the too-kind people in the market. She can only imagine what she’d do if she knew that they started stealing more than a couple coins and luring people into dark alleys for Hydra’s missions.
“I put a lot on the line for you to not be locked up in some dark hole in the middle of nowhere. Some of the council even wanted to put you back on The Raft.”
“That wouldn’t be too bad,” she says with a small half-shrug. Her eyes wander now, no longer locked onto the school. “I’ve been through worse.”
Monica ignores her. “That means you’re my responsibility. We had an agreement.”
Wanda bites her lip, looking down at the thin, black bracelet wrapped tight around her wrist, shrunken to the exact diameter. To small orbs of scarlet appear in the palm of her other hand. She bends her wrist, letting them roll down to the tips of her fingers. Twisting them around, the orbs begin to slowly spin, centered around their own little gravity.
“I’m aware of what we agreed upon,” she says, watching them move with a sad little smile. “But this is all that I have left.”
She doesn’t say much more than that. Monica leaves eventually, as Wanda continues to watch the school slowly leak out people until it's empty. But no agents come to collect her, and she’s left to be. She makes sure to nod at the camera when she returns to her apartment, pretends that she doesn’t cook more food than she’d ever eat in one meal. The next day, she returns to the rooftop.