Wanda
Stark Tower, just after Chapter 25
The Soldier was awake again. It had been a while, since the last time he’d been awake. Days. He was aware of this — he was behind, and last time he’d been out, he hadn’t even collected any data. Nothing new, anyway.
As usual, he got out of bed and made his way to the door. Like he always did, he took the stairs up a couple of floors, and, just like last time, he found the door locked.
You should know this by now, the voice sighed behind him.
He spun around, but, predictably, there was no one there.
Go back to your room, it said reprovingly.
The Soldier didn’t obey. There would be nothing for him to find for his handlers if he went back downstairs to his room. He’d been there hundreds of times. Yes, there was a laptop in the bedroom, but he was sure he’d gone through it before. Doing it again would be a waste of time.
Instead, he turned on his heel away from the door and climbed further up the stairs. The voice couldn’t stop him.
He climbed, but he didn’t bother trying any of the doors. He only wanted to go up — surely this place had roof access. He didn’t know why he wanted to see the roof so badly, but maybe there was a view up there. Maybe they had a helicopter, or some other strange, new technology. Maybe there was something his handlers would want.
There were so many stairs — his legs ached as he climbed flight after flight, his breath came in ragged gasps, and he broke into a sweat before he was even four floors up.
It was pitiful, but his urge to climb higher and find the roof only grew as he got nearer to the top. There were signs every few floors that told him how far he had to go, but the numbers weren’t changing fast enough. He broke into a jog, even as he gasped for breath and black spots dotted his vision.
Someone wanted him on the roof — not his handlers, but someone. He’d never felt anything like this before, and he needed to know who or what was behind it.
At long last, he reached the end of the staircase.
There was a door at the end of it, like all the other floors. This one, like all the others, was solid metal.
Unlike the others, though, the metal was very hot. Red light glowed from beneath it. Before he knew what he was doing, he was pulling the sleeve of his shirt over his hand and fumbling with the handle. To his immense surprise, it swung open, and with so little effort on his part that it was almost as if someone had opened it for him.
There was a woman standing on the other side. She couldn’t possibly have been the one to open it, though, because she was in the middle of the roof.
“You came,” she said softly. She spoke with an accent — her voice was soft and gentle and it reminded him of Natalia, someone… well, he’d met her somewhere.
She was smiling. Her clothes were red — the same color as the light he’d seen under the door. That was gone now, but the roof was by no means dark. There was a full moon.
The Soldier stood there in the doorway, shivering as the heat dissipated. He wanted it back.
“I didn’t think you would.”
He didn’t quite know what to say to her — this was only the second time he’d run into someone on one of these missions. He remembered the boy from the last time, but he couldn’t remember for the life of him what the protocol was or even how he’d handled the situation. His handlers were going to kill him.
The woman murmured something to herself and gestured sharply with one hand. There was a flash of red light the same color as the blouse she wore, and everything went dark.
When Bucky opened his eyes, he was staring up into a deep, blue midnight sky. He blinked. The stars didn’t fade away, and the velvety blue-black color above him wasn’t replaced with blank, white ceiling.
He started to sit up, his head spinning.
“Don’t get up,” said a very familiar voice from beside him.
He looked over. There was a woman sitting beside him, someone he’d never seen before in his life. “Who…?” He croaked, his voice shaking slightly. His arms shook, too, as he struggled to support himself.
“My name is Wanda,” she said patiently.
“Why — where am I — who are you, what time is it —“ he spluttered.
She laughed. “It’s all right, Bucky. Jarvis told me you were up. He said you were restless.”
He was? And how did she know his name, anyway? Could he get away with just leaving now and going back to bed?
Probably not, he decided with a little sigh. Wanda was watching him keenly — and worse, she was blocking the door.
“Was I sleepwalking?” He asked.
“I don’t know. He didn’t tell me, and it was… hard to tell, anyway. You seemed lucid enough.”
Jarvis was useless, sometimes. “Oh.”
“Yeah. Do you sleepwalk often?”
“Don’t you know already?” Bucky asked gloomily. Surely Tony hadn’t missed anyone in his attempts to tell the whole Tower about it.
“No,” she admitted, her eyebrows raised. “No one told me, anyway. Why?”
He didn’t like the way she’d phrased that, but he decided not to pay attention to it. “Just wondering,” he said. She really must live under a rock if she didn’t know, he decided, or maybe he was lucky. “What’re you doing up here, anyway? It’s so high.” His ears had begun to pop as he’d climbed the last few flights of stairs.
She nodded. “Isn’t it? I just like it up here. That’s all.”
“Oh — okay.” He began to wonder whether he was afraid of heights.
“It’s quiet, isn’t it? You can’t even hear the traffic. And sometimes my boyfriend comes to sit up here with me. It’s… a nice place.”
“Your boyfriend?”
She smiled slightly. “Yes, my boyfriend. I don’t think you’ve met him yet. His name is Vision — he’s… nice, when you get to know him.”
“Oh. Do you guys live around here? I’ve never seen you before. Never met a guy named Vision, either.”
“Yeah. Mostly we keep to ourselves. We missed the dinner party tonight. Did you go?”
He’d nearly forgotten about the dinner party, but now it all came back. He wished she hadn’t brought it up, and he hastily tried to put all thoughts of Steve out of his mind. “Yeah. I went.”
“Oh. Good. Vision and I always miss those, and… my brother usually does, too.”
“You have a brother?”
“Yeah. I do. His name’s Pietro. I think you’d like him if you met him.”
“What’s he like?” Bucky asked. He was curious — Wanda herself was very strange, and he wondered if her brother (or her boyfriend, for that matter) was any different.
“Well… he’s sort of… odd. But you’d like him, I think.” She smiled lopsidedly. “I could introduce you, sometime?”
The idea of meeting new people — even just one more — still made him terribly anxious, but he couldn’t refuse. “Okay. If you… if you want to.” If the dinner party was anything to go by, it probably wouldn’t go very well, but who knew. Maybe Pietro would be nice. Clint certainly had been, but Bucky had made that weird.
He’d try harder not to fuck things up next time.
“Of course I do,” she said, in what he supposed was meant to be a reassuring kind of way. “And he’d love to meet you. He’s… kept to himself, lately.”
Well, Bucky could relate to that. Maybe it was better to leave Pietro alone.
Wanda continued, “But he could use some company. And he’d like you… you’d like him, too.”
Bucky had his doubts, but he didn’t interrupt her. Besides, he still rather thought this was a dream or some strange sleepwalking episode — maybe, unlike Peter, she would turn out not to be real at all. Hell, maybe Peter wasn’t real, either.
“Bucky?” Wanda called softly. “You all right?”
“Yeah.” He shook his head slightly as if that would help him focus. “Sorry. Got distracted.” His head throbbed, and Wanda’s face went slightly blurry for a moment. He made a mental note to stay still.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You must be tired. It’s late.”
“I’m fine,” he said hastily. “It’s no big deal.”
“Are you sure?” She asked. “It’s all right if you want to go to bed.”
“No, really. I’m… I’m fine. I was just gonna stay up and read tonight, anyway. I… I don’t know what happened.”
She laughed. “It happens sometimes. Don’t worry. What were you reading?”
“Well… Steve gave me a bunch of books.” His stomach twisted at the thought of Steve. He wished he hadn’t brought him up in the first place. “I finished Farewell to Arms. I was going to read Macbeth. Have you heard of it?”
“Heard of it?” Wanda demanded, and Bucky was slightly taken aback by the indignation in her voice. “Of course I’ve heard of it! Have you started it yet?”
“I… I’ve read it before. Just don’t remember it too well, is all.”
Wanda shook her head in apparent disappointment. “You should have stayed in tonight, Bucky.”
He got the feeling she was making fun of him. “I would have! I dunno how I ended up here.”
“That’s a little bit my fault,” she admitted.
“How?” He couldn’t imagine how he’d even ended up here, let alone what Wanda had to do with it. No one should have access to a roof this tall.
“It’s just a… I guess it’s a talent of mine,” she said, and a very familiar red light flared up between her fingers.
Bucky stared, and it was extinguished. “How did you do that?” He asked, his voice soft and full of awe. He was dreaming, and he knew it, too, but that didn’t make it any less incredible.
“Just a gift of mine. Pietro can do things like this, too, you know. He can show you sometime if you like.”
“Oh. I… I guess?” He knew that would never happen — this had been a very long dream already, and he was bound to wake up soon — but Pietro sounded interesting. “He sounds like an interesting guy. But… really. How did you do that? With the lights?”
He was still convinced that if it wasn’t just part of the dream, it was some kind of complicated sleight of hand as if she had a little red flashlight hidden up her sleeve. Ha.
“Oh, it’s… no big deal,” she said hastily. “Really. It’s easy. Just something I can… do.”
Another little hand gesture of hers and Bucky was suddenly very sleepy. It took him by surprise, and he nearly fell back onto the ground. His head had stopped hurting, though — he hadn’t noticed immediately, but now it was warm and almost pleasant.
“Are you all right?” Wanda was asking.
Bucky looked up at her, confused. “Huh?”
“Sorry. You looked… I don’t know. Disoriented.” Something about her concern seemed almost false. There was a knowing kind of look in her eye.
“Oh, I’m… I’m fine. Just tired,” he said quickly.
“Well, you might want to go to bed,” she said offhandedly. “It’s late. I would think you are tired. It sounds like you’ve had quite a night.”
He nodded. Was she trying to get rid of him? He was tired — so tired that he might even fall asleep on his feet in the elevator on the way downstairs — but he couldn’t wait to get into bed. It was cold on the roof, so cold that his fingertips burned and the tips of his ears were numb, and his legs ached, too. He felt as though he’d climbed a hundred flights of stairs. “I have.”
“Well, go, then,” she said. “You’re exhausted.”
And sure enough, with every word she spoke, he only became more tired. All he wanted in the world was to collapse into bed. He stood slowly, his legs shaking. “I will,” he said. “It was nice meeting you, Wanda.”
“And you, too, Bucky.”
He rose and turned to head for the door. “Good night.”
“Good night,” she echoed.
Bucky hardly heard her, though, because the further away from her she got, the sleepier and sleepier he was, until finally, he was asleep. He became the Soldier again just as he reached the door, and the Soldier climbed down the stairs, satisfied with that night’s mission, and retreated to his room.