Wanda Maximoff’s loneliness, Stephen reminds himself, is not his problem to fix. Even if there’s another unexpected little ache, a sliver of glass in his chest, thinking of what could have been. She’d been his first thought, back in New York. He had wanted to go to her for help. A teammate, a friend. He had vanishingly few of those.
The multiverse is massive and sprawling, and somewhere, maybe they—
He cuts himself off from that line of thought. Wanda’s good at controlling her presentation, and he notes it with his usual wariness: potential manipulation. He’s still standing next to the table, and already tall at six-feet; she’s still sitting on the floor with her back against the stacks, having to tilt her chin to look up at him. Seeming smaller. Diminished. Purposeful, he’s sure. Look: I have no claws. You want to help me.
He thinks of Ennaris and her telepathic abilities, but he’s not about to give away someone else’s secret, and surely the Scarlet Witch would rankle at the prospect of training with him. She’d never needed it before.
He does wonder, though: “You say it’s turned off. Can you still read minds at all? If you try? I’m not asking out of threat assessment, I’m asking out of curiosity.”
But he is asking out of threat assessment. Stephen Strange would be an idiot not to. It hardly matters to her if it's not the primary reason why he asks now; he's always planning a few steps ahead just in case.
It's why he would never fit with The Avengers. As much as she adores Steve, he thrived in being reactive, not proactive. Stark, too.
Wanda lets it go. If he's to meet her halfway, she will join him. Resting her head against the shelves, she doesn't look away from him. She won't grow defensive unless given a reason to.
"I haven't tried here."
That sounds recklessly silly, doesn't it? But—
"People seem very friendly," she says, drawing her brows together. Yes, it's a strange concept. Westview had been similar, but she wrote that off as it simply being how she characterised the town. Aren't all the people in Stars Hollow in each other's business and overly familiar? "They've given me information without me needing to say anything."
Briefly resting her hand beneath her chin, she jokes, "Apparently I have a very friendly face." He's not the only one who can lean on humour.
The corner of his mouth flickers. It’s not an outright smile, more of a small muscle spasm, but at least it’s the memory of a smile. (They had, once upon a time, talked and joked and it had felt comfortable. Not strained, not the way they’re now searching for multiple layers and nested motives. But at least he’s not trapping her in mirror dimensions and she’s not trying to rip his entrails out so, hey, that’s progress.)
“Riftwatch is efficient; its members won’t spare time for fools, but you’re not a fool, so they’ll be friendly and collaborative for the most part. The locals are… less so. They’re very mistrustful of magic, and to a certain extent, rifters.” The two of them are in the same boat in that regard.
But can she or can’t she read minds? That’s the question. And it’s a huge risk to leave it unanswered. Stephen’s presumably the only person in all of Thedas who knows what Wanda Maximoff was once capable of, and therefore so far the only person she can discuss this without preamble.
So he considers. It’s curiosity and risk assessment. Where would she sit on the blood magic scale, to an untrained local eye?
Stephen makes a decision.
This is atrocious, he hates to do it, to bare his throat to someone who could so efficiently tear it out, but after another moment he pulls up one of the chairs and sits down at the library table. Literally meeting her halfway. “Try me,” he says. His voice is a little stiff, expression still guarded, but: “Better than you first doing it accidentally on some baker down in Kirkwall market.”
At least this is with permission. Consent. (Trust, or the fledgling beginnings of it.) So, with that, Stephen consciously lets his mental barriers drop: the ones he had learned to put up against demonic possession, against her; he goes against every last self-protective instinct and opens his mind to Wanda instead.
Wanda stares at him with a crinkled brow. He moves, and she sits still. She often liked to mimic those around her, consciously and unconsciously parroting their movements in real-time. It's how she learned to walk with confidence, like Pietro, and hold her coffee, like Natasha. It's how she perfected her American accent, and even worked on her Brooklyn one while listening and echoing Steve.
She doesn't try to mimic Strange now.
Is it a trap? Would accepting this invitation prove to him that she is still a danger to those around her? If she accepts, he can— What? Inform everyone he invited her to read his mind, she did, and therefore conclude she is evil? Strange is not a storyteller. He reads bodies; he understands the fundamentals from textbooks and experience of cutting people open. He is nothing like her when it comes to weaving great tales that could be real.
Wanda doesn't get up from where she sits, not wishing to spook him.
She doesn't know why she does it. Lifting her hand, she curls her fingers into her palm but her index and middle, and presses those two against her temple as she looks at him. Her eyes don't glow red; she isn't interested in puppeteering him. It's meant to be akin to skating along the surface of a thick layer of ice.
She's too nervous. She doesn't approach it with the ease she's used to. But there's resistance that isn't in the form of any mental barrier he's erected. What was once a seamless slither feels like trudging through a thick bog. But Wanda persists.
He's afraid. Wanda doesn't need telepathy to know that.
This isn’t the easy, unthinking process it once had been, where she would’ve been able to play him like a harp back home. Her fingers needling through his mind like flicking through a filing cabinet, pulling out slivers of thought and memory.
And he’s still fearful and guarded, which makes it a little more difficult. The shape of Thedas itself rebels against this, making all magic harder, more purposeful: you have to fight for it. Press harder. Her weight leaning on the ice, which creaks underfoot,
and Stephen exhales a shaky breath, noticing that he’s started clenching his jaw, and has to remind himself to relax again. The door opens a little wider, and he lets her in.
It’s still surface-level, but Wanda catches those glimpses of Stephen’s rapid-fire thoughts as they skim past her:
They’re in the library, home to Mobius and his filing system, which reminds him— Stephen has a book on Orlesian botany that he probably needs to return soon,
There’s that stack of forms on the table beside him, the medical questionnaire she still needs to fill out,
(wary relief at a familiar face, at her death not being on his conscience after all)
Wonder which division she’ll pick —
And at least Provost Stark isn’t here anymore to complicate matters even further. Small favours.
Who worries about returning a book? Wanda rolls her eyes and lets him guide her, although the process is much more difficult than she remembers. It's like walking through skating without blades on her shoes. She isn't quite certain if she's moving at all. Is he even reaching for her? Is she even slipping beyond the surface?
The cracks are thick enough to slide through. The ice beneath her feet falls. But the water around her is far too icy. This used to be seamless; it used to feel like flying. His mind should feel like a blank piece of paper for her to scribble upon.
Her right temple thumps. Wanda ignores it. Hadn't she done that before, a long time ago? Instead of a dimly lit and well-stocked library, it had been the dull, grey prison of HYDRA.
She disallows its entrance and focuses on Stephen. She lets his thoughts roll over her, but they feel sharp. All her efforts push back on her mind wishing to take over, to find something normal, to ensure that this isn't a trick by Strange—
She slams the door on Stark. Sharp throbbing pounds behind her eye. Wanda glares at him, feeling…
"No," she snaps. "Not him."
Attending his funeral hadn't been her choice, nor did it bring her closure. She doesn't wish for him to haunt her here, either. Not now. Not when Stephen Strange is trying to trust her, and she him.
It’s a shock to the system, Wanda sinking into all the nooks and crannies and crevices of his mind and then having to abruptly yank herself back out in a rush, messy, the door slamming shut behind her, retreating too quickly; is there such a thing as telepathic decompression sickness? The bends. Her right temple thumps, and his left temple throbs. Stephen pinches the bridge of his nose.
“Sorry,” he says, apologetic in a way he isn’t often with people; it was the exact thing he hadn’t wanted to dredge up out of his subconscious around her, but that’s the whole trouble, isn’t it? Don’t think of pink elephants.
“You’ll probably— you’ll see his name all over the various Riftwatch paperwork and reports. He used to be here, too. He’s gone now.”
He keeps his voice as steady as he can, stripped of emotion and whatever hard-to-pin feeling he might have about that himself. Information. This is simply passing on relevant information.
Speaking of Tony Stark is the equivalent of shoving her finger into a gaping wound and keeping it open. It's never going to heal. Even with him dead, she will never be able to move on from what he is inadvertently responsible for. Not even here, in another universe. Is this what Agatha would consider karma? Is this what she deserves after Westview and Earth-838?
Perhaps.
She inhales deeply through her nose, still frowning. Her anger burns; the fear and uncertainty she has buried down since arriving in Thedas threatens to rise to the surface. Wanda wishes to lash out.
She takes a moment. One. Two. Three. Doesn't quite calm, but it's a good enough effort.
"Are you sad about that?" It's a snap, even though she doesn't intend it to be. Does Strange feel sad at the loss of Stark? (Would he feel saddened by the loss of her if she were to disappear from this place? Such a ridiculous thought. He should be relieved, just as she is she won't stumble into Stark's ghost.)
Stephen exhales again, slow. Still feeling a little discombobulated by her presence, the ghosting memory of her fingers in his skull.
It’s too big a can of worms to open when she’s a walking talking can of worms herself. Tony had been a strained colleague, eventually maybe a friend after a year in Thedas. Someone he’d once led to their death. He thought he’d done the same with her. He can’t get into it. So—
“I don’t know that it matters,” Stephen says instead, his voice mild, her snap ricocheting off that carefully-honed neutrality. It’s not the place or time to discuss his feelings with Wanda Maximoff, when he abhors having them at all, and would prefer to neatly sidestep them. “But I’m here. You’re here. That’s what we’re working with. Which reminds me—”
And then, perhaps it’s a distraction and another deflection from the wounds between them, or maybe he just remembered what he was supposed to be doing, but he picks up the piece of paper he brought with him and frisbees it in Wanda’s direction with the flick of a wrist. It drifts over, to be snatched up at ease: a blank questionnaire.
He denies her the opportunity to be angry about… what? A man who she's seemingly missed bumping into in Thedas. Isn't it a blessing that Stark is gone? The last person she wishes to see is him. (The last being she wishes to see is Ultron.)
Gently taking the paper from the air, Wanda holds it with both hands and frowns at it. A… questionnaire.
A questionnaire.
The last time she filled one of these out— Is almost every little thing between them going to throw her back into the past? She doesn't wish to think of HYDRA. She doesn't want to remember how she had been poked and prodded on the Raft.
She exhales softly to release the tension building within her. Wanda doesn't lift her gaze. "What will you do with this information?" There's no bite to her soft bark. Her uncertainty is warranted; she doesn't wish to be seen as another experiment.
“I’m Head Healer here,” Stephen repeats, matter-of-fact. He’s finding his stride again, mustering his composure back into place as he rediscovers familiar footing; this sort of intake, he has done before. He has a frame of reference for this, unlike the daunting uncharted territory of Wanda herself. (Here be dragons.)
“The records were a bit of a shambles when I first took over. Mostly it’s to avoid any truly stupid accidents: what if the Gallows kitchens prepared a dinner with nuts, and one of our number died to an allergy? They don’t have EpiPens here. If someone has chronic migraines that they might need regular painkillers for, that’s good to know for keeping track of stockpiling and inventory. And so on, and so on. Everyday purposes.”
It’s boring and banal and not nefarious, in short.
“It’s useful to simply have it for reference. So, case in point: are you allergic to tree nuts, Wanda Maximoff?”
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Wanda Maximoff’s loneliness, Stephen reminds himself, is not his problem to fix. Even if there’s another unexpected little ache, a sliver of glass in his chest, thinking of what could have been. She’d been his first thought, back in New York. He had wanted to go to her for help. A teammate, a friend. He had vanishingly few of those.
The multiverse is massive and sprawling, and somewhere, maybe they—
He cuts himself off from that line of thought. Wanda’s good at controlling her presentation, and he notes it with his usual wariness: potential manipulation. He’s still standing next to the table, and already tall at six-feet; she’s still sitting on the floor with her back against the stacks, having to tilt her chin to look up at him. Seeming smaller. Diminished. Purposeful, he’s sure. Look: I have no claws. You want to help me.
He thinks of Ennaris and her telepathic abilities, but he’s not about to give away someone else’s secret, and surely the Scarlet Witch would rankle at the prospect of training with him. She’d never needed it before.
He does wonder, though: “You say it’s turned off. Can you still read minds at all? If you try? I’m not asking out of threat assessment, I’m asking out of curiosity.”
no subject
It's why he would never fit with The Avengers. As much as she adores Steve, he thrived in being reactive, not proactive. Stark, too.
Wanda lets it go. If he's to meet her halfway, she will join him. Resting her head against the shelves, she doesn't look away from him. She won't grow defensive unless given a reason to.
"I haven't tried here."
That sounds recklessly silly, doesn't it? But—
"People seem very friendly," she says, drawing her brows together. Yes, it's a strange concept. Westview had been similar, but she wrote that off as it simply being how she characterised the town. Aren't all the people in Stars Hollow in each other's business and overly familiar? "They've given me information without me needing to say anything."
Briefly resting her hand beneath her chin, she jokes, "Apparently I have a very friendly face." He's not the only one who can lean on humour.
no subject
“Riftwatch is efficient; its members won’t spare time for fools, but you’re not a fool, so they’ll be friendly and collaborative for the most part. The locals are… less so. They’re very mistrustful of magic, and to a certain extent, rifters.” The two of them are in the same boat in that regard.
But can she or can’t she read minds? That’s the question. And it’s a huge risk to leave it unanswered. Stephen’s presumably the only person in all of Thedas who knows what Wanda Maximoff was once capable of, and therefore so far the only person she can discuss this without preamble.
So he considers. It’s curiosity and risk assessment. Where would she sit on the blood magic scale, to an untrained local eye?
Stephen makes a decision.
This is atrocious, he hates to do it, to bare his throat to someone who could so efficiently tear it out, but after another moment he pulls up one of the chairs and sits down at the library table. Literally meeting her halfway. “Try me,” he says. His voice is a little stiff, expression still guarded, but: “Better than you first doing it accidentally on some baker down in Kirkwall market.”
At least this is with permission. Consent. (Trust, or the fledgling beginnings of it.) So, with that, Stephen consciously lets his mental barriers drop: the ones he had learned to put up against demonic possession, against her; he goes against every last self-protective instinct and opens his mind to Wanda instead.
A door, cracked ajar.
no subject
She doesn't try to mimic Strange now.
Is it a trap? Would accepting this invitation prove to him that she is still a danger to those around her? If she accepts, he can— What? Inform everyone he invited her to read his mind, she did, and therefore conclude she is evil? Strange is not a storyteller. He reads bodies; he understands the fundamentals from textbooks and experience of cutting people open. He is nothing like her when it comes to weaving great tales that could be real.
Wanda doesn't get up from where she sits, not wishing to spook him.
She doesn't know why she does it. Lifting her hand, she curls her fingers into her palm but her index and middle, and presses those two against her temple as she looks at him. Her eyes don't glow red; she isn't interested in puppeteering him. It's meant to be akin to skating along the surface of a thick layer of ice.
She's too nervous. She doesn't approach it with the ease she's used to. But there's resistance that isn't in the form of any mental barrier he's erected. What was once a seamless slither feels like trudging through a thick bog. But Wanda persists.
He's afraid. Wanda doesn't need telepathy to know that.
no subject
And he’s still fearful and guarded, which makes it a little more difficult. The shape of Thedas itself rebels against this, making all magic harder, more purposeful: you have to fight for it. Press harder. Her weight leaning on the ice, which creaks underfoot,
and Stephen exhales a shaky breath, noticing that he’s started clenching his jaw, and has to remind himself to relax again. The door opens a little wider, and he lets her in.
It’s still surface-level, but Wanda catches those glimpses of Stephen’s rapid-fire thoughts as they skim past her:
They’re in the library, home to Mobius and his filing system, which reminds him— Stephen has a book on Orlesian botany that he probably needs to return soon,
There’s that stack of forms on the table beside him, the medical questionnaire she still needs to fill out,
(wary relief at a familiar face, at her death not being on his conscience after all)
Wonder which division she’ll pick —
And at least Provost Stark isn’t here anymore to complicate matters even further. Small favours.
no subject
Who worries about returning a book? Wanda rolls her eyes and lets him guide her, although the process is much more difficult than she remembers. It's like walking through skating without blades on her shoes. She isn't quite certain if she's moving at all. Is he even reaching for her? Is she even slipping beyond the surface?
The cracks are thick enough to slide through. The ice beneath her feet falls. But the water around her is far too icy. This used to be seamless; it used to feel like flying. His mind should feel like a blank piece of paper for her to scribble upon.
Her right temple thumps. Wanda ignores it. Hadn't she done that before, a long time ago? Instead of a dimly lit and well-stocked library, it had been the dull, grey prison of HYDRA.
She disallows its entrance and focuses on Stephen. She lets his thoughts roll over her, but they feel sharp. All her efforts push back on her mind wishing to take over, to find something normal, to ensure that this isn't a trick by Strange—
She slams the door on Stark. Sharp throbbing pounds behind her eye. Wanda glares at him, feeling…
"No," she snaps. "Not him."
Attending his funeral hadn't been her choice, nor did it bring her closure. She doesn't wish for him to haunt her here, either. Not now. Not when Stephen Strange is trying to trust her, and she him.
no subject
“Sorry,” he says, apologetic in a way he isn’t often with people; it was the exact thing he hadn’t wanted to dredge up out of his subconscious around her, but that’s the whole trouble, isn’t it? Don’t think of pink elephants.
“You’ll probably— you’ll see his name all over the various Riftwatch paperwork and reports. He used to be here, too. He’s gone now.”
He keeps his voice as steady as he can, stripped of emotion and whatever hard-to-pin feeling he might have about that himself. Information. This is simply passing on relevant information.
no subject
Perhaps.
She inhales deeply through her nose, still frowning. Her anger burns; the fear and uncertainty she has buried down since arriving in Thedas threatens to rise to the surface. Wanda wishes to lash out.
She takes a moment. One. Two. Three. Doesn't quite calm, but it's a good enough effort.
"Are you sad about that?" It's a snap, even though she doesn't intend it to be. Does Strange feel sad at the loss of Stark? (Would he feel saddened by the loss of her if she were to disappear from this place? Such a ridiculous thought. He should be relieved, just as she is she won't stumble into Stark's ghost.)
no subject
It’s too big a can of worms to open when she’s a walking talking can of worms herself. Tony had been a strained colleague, eventually maybe a friend after a year in Thedas. Someone he’d once led to their death. He thought he’d done the same with her. He can’t get into it. So—
“I don’t know that it matters,” Stephen says instead, his voice mild, her snap ricocheting off that carefully-honed neutrality. It’s not the place or time to discuss his feelings with Wanda Maximoff, when he abhors having them at all, and would prefer to neatly sidestep them. “But I’m here. You’re here. That’s what we’re working with. Which reminds me—”
And then, perhaps it’s a distraction and another deflection from the wounds between them, or maybe he just remembered what he was supposed to be doing, but he picks up the piece of paper he brought with him and frisbees it in Wanda’s direction with the flick of a wrist. It drifts over, to be snatched up at ease: a blank questionnaire.
no subject
Gently taking the paper from the air, Wanda holds it with both hands and frowns at it. A… questionnaire.
A questionnaire.
The last time she filled one of these out— Is almost every little thing between them going to throw her back into the past? She doesn't wish to think of HYDRA. She doesn't want to remember how she had been poked and prodded on the Raft.
She exhales softly to release the tension building within her. Wanda doesn't lift her gaze. "What will you do with this information?" There's no bite to her soft bark. Her uncertainty is warranted; she doesn't wish to be seen as another experiment.
no subject
“The records were a bit of a shambles when I first took over. Mostly it’s to avoid any truly stupid accidents: what if the Gallows kitchens prepared a dinner with nuts, and one of our number died to an allergy? They don’t have EpiPens here. If someone has chronic migraines that they might need regular painkillers for, that’s good to know for keeping track of stockpiling and inventory. And so on, and so on. Everyday purposes.”
It’s boring and banal and not nefarious, in short.
“It’s useful to simply have it for reference. So, case in point: are you allergic to tree nuts, Wanda Maximoff?”