sixthiterationlogs | 004 Unhappy changes [OPEN]

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004 Unhappy changes [OPEN]

WHO: Wanda Maximoff
WHERE: Home/Inn/Woods
WHEN: May 1st - 8th
OPEN TO: EVERYONE
WARNINGS: None yet
STATUS: OPEN

Home - May 1st – Early Morning

It wasn’t unusual for Wanda to be woken by her nightmares. They came more readily here than they had at home, playing over every loss and uncertainty like a Scooby Doo rerun on TV. Lately her dreams have been about her brother and more often than not she’d find herself jolting awake by slinging a ball of red sparks across the room. This morning brought no damage to her surroundings. Her heart pounded frantically in her chest while sweat matted her long dark hair to her neck and shoulders.

She was quick to get dressed, pulling on her jeans and the white tank top that she’d been given on her arrival. The house was warm though she could feel the morning chill creeping like thin tendrils through the air. With a heavy sign Wanda kicked open the door to her room and headed down stairs to see how much of the night’s fire was still burning in the hearth. Her fingers laced through her hair pulling the brown silky strands back from her face. When she reached the living room Wanda extended her fingertips out towards the far side of the room, willing her powers to move a log onto the fire.

Nothing happened.

She called for her abilities again but nothing happened. "Move." She kept her hand pointed towards the far side of the room, her voice harsh as she glared at the stack of logs. "MOVE!" Wanda shouted as she quickly stepped towards the small stack of logs, kicking the one she’d been commanding halfway across the room. The log thumped loudly against the floor. She wanted to scream at the piece of wood but what little self-control she had stopped her.

Woods/Around - May 1st - All Day

Eventually Wanda left her house. Tension was set in her shoulders as she walked straight for the forests edge. She didn’t want to believe that her powers were gone, that there was now nothing she could do. She was helpless, defenseless. She couldn’t protect anyone.

She’d had her powers for so long; she didn’t know how to handle them being gone.

When she reached the trees she shouted, listening to her pained cry carry over the canopy. She kicked at the trees around her, her boots stopping with every solid object that she’d come into contact with. Rage, pain, fear, frustration and hate mingled in her chest as she lashed out at everything around her. She threw a fist into the tree, feeling the rough texture of the bark scrape and bruise her knuckles. Again and again she hit the trunk of the tree, wishing she could push all of her feelings away.

When she returned her town her knuckles were bloody and brushed, her hair matted to her neck where a thin layer of sweat covered her skin. She looked tired and worn out, having managed to release the bulk her frustration in the woods.

Inn/Around - May 2nd - 8th - Brooding

Wanda could be found in many places throughout the village. She was determined to prove that being without her powers didn’t change anything. She knew it did but it was the only way she could fight the frustration that knotted and grew uncomfortably in her chest.

Early in the morning Wanda would split wood for her home, occasionally kicking a piece of timber that wouldn’t split properly. She helped Kate preserve the meat at the inn; this never required the use of her abilities and was now one of Wanda’s favorite tasks. While every other after noon she could be found cooking at the inn, using the few spices that she knew and testing the ones she didn’t. Wanda wasn’t sure when the last time she ate was. She remembered making food but not eating it.

In the evenings Wanda dreaded to return home. It was when she was trying to sleep, alone in her room that she’d lose herself to her thoughts and her doubt. It was stupid. She knew that but so many things were changing and there was nothing she could do to stop it. A distraction, all she needed was a distraction.

She could usually be found sitting at a random table in the common area. There was a button on the table in front of her; sometimes she’d spin it on its side with her finger while other times she’d just stare at it, expecting something to happen. Towards the beginning of the month she’d search for any abandoned liquor from the feast, welcoming the dizzying sensation that it brought with it.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Learn to protect myself another way." Wanda was quick to give Peggy an answer. She would never stop fighting. There was no other place in the world for her. She couldn't go off and be a normal young adult, the only skills she had were breed in war.

She shook her head before picking up the button on the table. Wanda's eyes fell to her knuckles which were scared from punching a tree seven days before.

"I'm not going to stop fighting." She clarified, knowing that Peggy hadn't been privy to the way that she'd joined the Avengers or why.

"I don't expect you to," Peggy replies, hoping that the implication hadn't been there. In fact, Peggy is absolutely all for fighting against whatever has put them here, but she believes that there's a modicum of strategy required. "I'd be happy to show you some hand to hand, if you'd like to learn more," she says.

"I'm not sure how much you already know," is her confession, "but I'm always happy to find a new sparring partner."

Wanda knew a surprising amount of hand to hand fighting. It wasn't a particular style but she'd had to learn to protect herself at a very young age. Since joining the Avengers she'd learned more though she'd focused more on increasing the strength and control of her powers.

"I bit. Clint has been teaching me." As had Tim during Peggy's class. Wanda was happy to have people to fight with, learning bits and pieces as she went. It was easier for her to learn where people wouldn't pull their punches.

"If you're looking for more, I'd be happy to work with you on a woman to woman basis," Peggy says, though she feels rather good about hearing that Clint has been helping with that. "I'd like to think that I'm just as capable as any man, but the techniques are different," she acknowledges, purely from a strength and weight class standpoint.

"I'd be more than happy to take on a new partner. It would keep me occupied, after all," she admits.

Wanda nodded her head. "I'd like that." There was a moment's pause where Wanda played with the button, moving it effortlessly between her fingers.

"Could you do me a favor?" She asked, looking up to meet Peggy's gaze. "Could you take Jean on too? She's learning some from Erik but she'd do better to learn some from you too."

"If she wants, of course," Peggy says with a nod of her head, seeing as she doesn't want to simply charge forward and insist that Jean do this, but if she comes to ask (or if Wanda truly wants it), then she'll never say no. "I'm not sitting here saying that I'm the end all and be all of fighting," she says, wanting to clarify that.

"I just know a thing or two about training, not to mention fighting appropriately for one's stature and size," she says. It doesn't mean weakness, just different.

"I know." It was just that Jean was slight and while Erik was surly a fine teacher, she thought that he relied to much on strength. Clint when teaching played into Wanda's strengths and weaknesses, teaching her to use her speed as it was one of her greatest assets.

"Seeing what others do. That's how I learned to fight." It had been in the field that she learned the greatest lessons.

Wanda paused before changing the subject slightly. "If you were faced with knowing the future. Would you ask about it?" She'd been thinking of asking Clint about her future for some time. Natasha had brought up the thought again but Wanda was undecided. Peggy seemed wise and was in a situation where much of what others new was her future.

"I learned to fight in the army," Peggy admits, but she'd learned how to develop it to her own strengths along the way, cultivating them in the SSR when sent during her undercover missions. She gives Wanda a curious look, though, when talk turns to the future.

"Yes," she says, because as far as she's concerned, more information can only help. "People have told me about my future a great deal here. It seems I live a prosperous, wonderful life. I don't know when that's bound to start, of course, being as I am rather trapped."

Wanda nodded her head. "I want to ask about the future but I don't know." Her accent thickens briefly before she coughs to clear her throat. She stopped playing with the button before placing it softly down on the table.

"Things weren't going well." Then again, there were few moments in Wanda's life where she could claim that things were going well.

Peggy wants to be thoughtful and delicate without giving bad advice. She also tries not to think about this from just her perspective, allowing her own emotions get involved. "I suppose what you truly need to ask yourself is whether you could live with whatever you find out," she admits. "If someone tells you the future, good or bad, you'll have to accept that you can't do anything about that here."

"Can you do that? If you can," Peggy reasons, "then I don't see the harm in knowing more. If you can't, then perhaps denial is best."

Wanda shrugged. "There are to many variables to know." She looked down at the button with a thoughtful stare. "I could accept it." She'd given it thought before, if only because of the general reluctance to tell her.

"Thanks." She'd still think it over but it was nice having the opinion of someone who faces a similar situation.

"Please, don't mention it," Peggy promises, because she wants to be any help that she can be. "I know that we're not exactly close, but I'd like to think that perhaps we could be. I find myself needing to start all over and make new friends, it's nice to think that I could learn a little more about people who knew Steve."

"It means I already know that you're a good person, because he's got impeccable taste," she jokes.

"Yeah."

Wanda felt herself smile despite the sinking feeling in her chest. "I don't know about that." She commented fondly. Those who were close to Steve couldn't help but both love and hate the man. "He is always able to see the good in people."

She never expected Steve to understand her situation but he tried and that's what counted.

"He's the best man I've ever known," Peggy admits, which is hard for her to talk about, especially when he's not here. "Once I'd lost him, I tried to live my life in a way that could answer the question, 'would Steve do this', and I'm not sure I was able to, recently." Her life is far more filled with shades of grey than she'd like.

Certainly, with the SSR, she'd become someone that didn't live up to Steve's heights. "At the same time, he wasn't there," she says, bottling up the heartbreak. "So I don't suppose I owe him anything, do I?"

Wanda rolled her shoulders. She was sure that there was only one Steve for a reason. "Sometimes I think Steve over simplifies, other times I think we need that. It depends." He needed a balance in Wanda's mind but her own negativity balanced out his advice decently well.

She looked up at Peggy, her expression growing more sober. "He didn't want to." She replied, her voice thick. "He didn't talk about it but he visited you at the hospital often. It hurt him." Wanda felt the words, he loved you balance on the tip of her tongue but she couldn't say it. That was something for Steve to say.

"You inspired him as much as he inspired you."

She hates to think about this future that's coming from her. If she leaves her, isn't that what's waiting? Steve, out of the ice, but far too late for them to have the life together that she had wanted. Even after she'd put him in the past, his resurrection here had unearthed old feelings and made it hard for her to put them away again.

"I heard that I'm not alive, there, not anymore," she says quietly. "I don't like to think about what that's done to Steve, because I know what it did to me. Still, I'm glad he has friends. I didn't have many, after I lost him. Circumstances and life changed, not for the better."

"You recently passed away." Wanda confirmed softly. "I think you gave Steve the strength to disobey the accords." She didn't know for sure. She didn't ask Steve but he was going against Tony, against Natasha and Vision. Wanda had no doubt where Steve's strength to face his friends came from.

"I'm sorry." She paused looking a bit younger than she normally did. "You have friends here." It wasn't forever but Wanda considered Peggy a friend.

Peggy knows that she couldn't have lived forever, but she also wishes that they could have found Steve in the ice sooner. Maybe they could have had some sort of shot at closure, even if their lives had diverted so much. Here, though, she's back to the crossroads. There's no Steve, but there's no Daniel either, and she needs to decide what direction to take her life towards.

"I know," Peggy promises. "What accords?" she asks, because while she's heard a great deal of the future, this is the first she's heard of something like that.

It was easy for Wanda to understand the complications when standing at a crossroad. You have all the power to choose where your life goes and yet so much of what happens was out of you control. You begin to wonder which direction was the best way to go and realize that there was no way of truly knowing.

Wanda continued to pick at the button, her lips rolling together before she spoke. "It’s complicated." She exhaled slowly. She hadn’t gotten a chance to really talk about… anything since she arrived. This was her chance and Wanda wanted to take it. Peggy wasn’t just someone Steve knew and trusted; she was someone that Wanda knew and was learning to trust. "We were hunting down a terrorist; me, Steve, Sam and Natasha." Wanda licked her lips and continued. "They had stolen a virus that was similar to the black plague and were going to sell it on the black market. In our attempts to stop them…" Her voice trailed off and Wanda exhaled. It was clear that this wasn’t the easiest thing to talk about.

"There was a bomb. I surrounded it with my power and tried to get it up in the air. I wasn’t fast enough." There was a short pause before Wanda continued. "It hit the building next to us. Many people died. Due to the accident the accords were designed. They thought the Avengers too powerful and they wanted the world’s governments to control that power. The accords were to be signed by everyone in the Avengers. Steve refused. He said that governments were only after their own gain."

Wanda didn’t know what was best but she didn’t want to be viewed and used as a weapon.

It's strange, hearing about these missions that people she's come to care about so dearly have been on. With Steve leading them, Peggy can't help but wonder what they might have done if Steve hadn't gone down on the Valkyrie the way he had. She swallows back that regret, since this isn't the time for it.

Instead, Peggy listens as attentively as she can to Wanda. She can understand why Steve reacted the way he did, knowing that she would have likely thought the same. The government had turned Steve into a performing monkey, had kept his blood, had taken her worth and reduced it to nothing.

"I can't imagine that went over very well," Peggy says calmly, though a part of her is so very proud of Steve for it.

"It didn't." Wanda went back to playing with the button. She didn't know why the small piece of plastic fascinated her so much but she couldn't bring herself to put it down or away. It helped her think, as if turning the round object locked her thoughts firmly into place.

"The Avengers were dividing. Those of us who followed Steve and those who followed Tony and the accords." Her tongue drags over her lips. "Tony carries a lot of guilt." She did too but Wanda was significantly more comfortable talking about others.

"I can understand but it's sad to see."

The trouble with this whole situation is that Peggy can already feel herself bristling, wanting to solve the problem. If Tony is anything like his father (and from his time in the village, Peggy suspected that he was), she would have simply grabbed Steve by the shirt, Tony by the ear, and locked them all in a room until they reached a solution.

"Guilt about what?" Peggy asks, because while she might have spoken with him a great deal, personal topics always seemed evaded.

Being locked in a room would probably do Tony and Steve some good but Wanda feared that their conflict would devolve into fight and then getting others involved in their fight. In a way, that's exactly what happened.

"My home." She replied in a soft breath. She had to put down the button for this. "Before I joined the Avengers my brother and I were with Hydra. The Avengers stopped that location but Tony... he created a machine wanting to use the same artifact that gave me and my brother power. That machine was called Ultron." Wanda frowned and looked down at the button. She didn't feel right about her own actions through this but she couldn't do anything about that now.

"At first, my brother and I joined Ultron. Then we found out what he really wanted to do. He didn't want peace but to control humans. He thought that the answer was there. Ultron killed a lot of people in the fight to stop him." Her throat constricted.

"Tony carries every death with him." She quickly finished before quieting. She couldn't help but think of her brother and how badly she missed him.

Peggy's holding her breath the whole time, wondering how Tony could be so very much like Howard, in all the heartbreaking ways of it. "His father was like that," she says. "Howard never could let Steve go, nor the guilt of all the inventions that went wrong." He was able to subdue it, at times, but Peggy had seen him in those dark times when he couldn't fight it.

Poor Tony, though she also wishes that she could have been there to insist that a machine using alien technology was not bound to go well. "It's the mark of a good heart," she says. "Unfortunately, it's also easy to damage."

Wanda lifted her shoulders in a noncommittal shrug. "Like father like son. Tony will never forgive himself." It was something that Wanda knew after seeing Tony's fears. "And in order to protect people, he's very likely to make the same mistake again." Tony was very smart and it was his strength as much as it was his downfall.

"Is it?" She asked, genuinely curious. She'd felt guilt but she'd never consider herself of having a good heart.

Home - May 1st – Early Morning

Woods/Around - May 1st - All Day

Inn/Around - May 2nd - 8th - Brooding

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