Wanda Maximoff (highlyconnected) wrote in avengers_logs, @ 2018-03-03 23:41:00 |
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Entry tags: | -complete, stephen strange, wanda maximoff |
Who: Wanda Maximoff & Stephen Strange
What: A Meeting of Minds
When: After little while after this
Rating/Warnings: Green
Wanda quite liked New York City. It buzzed with life, the people were busy though, connected to their phones and their machines all the time, cars whistled down the road far too fast. There were a few times where she'd heard a sound that had caused her heart to race, reminding her of gunfire, a flashback to when she and her brother were younger and more helpless. At the sound of a car backfiring, she turned sharply on the spot, hands raised to defend herself before she caught herself and took a deep breath, trying to force herself to calm down, to stop the magenta flickers from surrounding her hands.
She had walked for quite a while, trying to clear her mind and wrap her head around what had happened. She had been supplanted just yesterday, though according to Clint the last time they had seen each other had been a number of weeks ago. She felt guilty for being relieved that she had not been without him as long as he had been without her. He had suggested that she go to Bleeker Street, to look for Doctor Strange and talk to him. He had magical abilities, according to Clint, a ‘master of the mystic arts, or whatever he’s calling himself’, to quote the archer directly.
She had seen a number of horrifying things in her life, but the idea of seeing magic - actual magic - filled her with a curiosity that she could hardly stand. She wondered if his magic was from the same kind of source as hers, the same source that created Vision, science from the stars. If it wasn’t, was it the same kind of magic that her mother and father had told them ran in the Maximoff veins from their grandparents?
She looked at the small card Clint had given her which had the address written on it in his distinctively scrawling handwriting. 122a Bleeker Street. She’d reached into the head of a nearby commuter to get the directions she needed and had changed direction twice until she turned up outside a building that looked unremarkable but felt like it didn’t belong. The hair on Wanda’s arms stood on end.
The Sokovian refugee - as she still wasn’t officially an American citizen - stood at the door for a long time, wringing her hands together before she took a breath and knocked, stepping back down away from the door and waiting patiently for it to be opened.
The door opened on its own, the interior looking dark and foreboding. It wasn't necessarily gloomy due to the decor, which was all old polished wood like the entire of an old Victorian home. The staircase - repaired after a Hulk crashed into it - was grand in every sense. But it was the ambience of the space within, a sort of preternatural stillness to the air, that made it seem uninviting. Even the lighting didn't seem to reach the corners of the space, leaving it half lit and half in shadow.
"Wanda Maximoff, I've been expecting you," a voice said, low in timbre but easy to hear despite the distance. "One moment, please."
The sound of a breaking dish could be heard, followed by that voice saying, "You're going to have to come out of there at some point. Don't make this harder than it needs to be."
Another crash rang out, and things went quiet until footsteps began to draw closer. Stephen peered around the corner of the door, squinting at the sunlight as though he hadn't been subjected to it in weeks.
"Hi." He held the door open further while giving the girl an almost sheepish smile. "Sorry about that. Having a fight with the fridge again. Come in. Please. I promise it's safer than it looks."
Wanda didn’t step inside at first, not until she heard someone calling her name. Only then did she enter the building. The door swung shut behind her. The heavy clunk made her jump and she turned to look at it, unsurprised to see that there was no one on the other side. She rubbed her upper arm as she waited for Dr Strange - she assumed - to join her or stop having the argument with whomever it was that he was fighting.
“I can take care of myself,” she told him, deciding not to ask him a question around why he was fighting with his fridge. This place made her feel distinctly uneasy and had no desire to stay for longer than was strictly necessary. She laced her fingers together in front of herself and walked towards him. “Clint suggested that I come to see you,” she continued, her voice still heavily accented despite her best efforts to hide it. “He told me that we are in an alternative timeline but that other than a few strange events everything is much the same.”
Dark eyes fixed themselves on Stephen’s face, an unformed question in the depths that she couldn’t form or speak. “Are you the one who provided me with the items I found when I arrived?”
The Sanctum didn't get very many visitors, and Stephen always took it as a good thing. Because quiet and boring meant that fewer things were going wrong with this universe. It also meant he that he could get a lot of reading done, absorbing as much knowledge as he could, as fast as he could. It did make for a certain amount of awkwardness when a visitor did show up. Wanda didn't seem like she was going to break anything though. Not on purpose. And Stark had let him know about Wanda when this mess first became known to them. It wasn't exactly a warning about her powers, but Stephen could tell the other man was trying to cover up the anxiety with what seemed to be an equal amount of concern.
Lucky for all involved, Stephen didn't seem concerned or anxious. The door closed on its own, even though Stephen was standing beside it. He managed a small smile and a nod of his head, before motioning toward a formal sitting room off to one side of the foyer.
"I did," Stephen told her, as he started walking in that direction. "Not only the items, but I split the timeline in two. Fate has chosen you, and some others, to try to preserve it. Or, at least, that's the sense that I get. Everyone else is living their own lives, unaware."
Ignorance was bliss. Or so Stephen was thinking to himself, as he entered the room and nodded toward one of the two chairs which were facing each other, where Wanda could sit down in one if she wanted to.
“Clint said this was your fault,” Wanda told him as she followed Stephen into the room and seated herself on one of the chairs. She crossed her legs at the ankle and kept her hands close to herself, arms not quite folded across her chest but she was definitely uncomfortable and therefore her posture was defensive, as if she were expecting something bad. She had not met the man before but she knew that what had happened prior to the Accords had been public knowledge. She understood - from Stark’s behaviour towards her and the comments Vision made - that many people were afraid of her.
It bothered her a lot. Stephen seemed to not be afraid, at least, and it would have been easy for her to find out how he truly felt but considering last time she walked around inside the heads of others the result had been Ultron and the death of her city and her brother, she was in little rush to do that again. The thought of Pietro made her chest tighten in a moment of breathtaking grief.
“Though I understand that you were saving us from something far worse. Sometimes there are consequences we do not foresee.” She shrugged her shoulders. “What happens now?”
Stephen sat down, his elbows resting on the arms of the chair so he cold prop his chin on one raised fist, watching Wanda closely. She seemed stable and more grounded than her twin, even though it was all too easy to pick up on the energy coursing through her, and how difficult that must be to keep it contained if a situation became tense or stressful.
His entire demeanor remained relaxed, because no, he wasn't scared of Wanda or her capabilities. She was strong in ways she probably wasn't fully aware of. Both in power and in resolve, despite everything that she was put through.
"It is my fault. I was saving the world from a demonic entity from the Dark Dimension," Stephen explained, feeling that Wanda was capable of handling the truth better than most. "The only way to do that, was to use magic to turn back time on one of the sanctums his cultists destroyed. Then I went through the rift between dimensions. Looped time until he bargained, and he left this world alone. It's my mistake that caused this, and saved this."
He made a little motion with his other hands, to indicate the world around them. Dying over and over again was painful, and also ended up becoming a chore when he knew what it was like. He lost count of how many times it happened, or how many different ways he died. There was a resigned acceptance of it, and holding such knowledge didn't scare him, either.
"What happens is that time moves forward. And we have to go forward with it, and protect what we can." It was a grim acceptance of what is, but pragmatic as well. "To quote Tolkien, All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. So what is it that you want to do now, Ms. Maximoff?"
Wanda’s eyes widened a little as Stephen told her what had truly happened to the world. She had no idea what the Dark Dimension was but she understood the power of cultists and demons, and if it was severe enough to have ripped the timeline in two then the correct course of action had been taken. She could not hold that against him; sometimes the only action was one that would have consequences that were far-felt.
“Thank you,” she said after a long moment of taking in what he’d said and processing it. She hoped someone else had said that to Stephen, thanked him even though it had caused this. He had managed to save the world. That was no small feat. “Regardless of the consequences of your actions, those of us that are here owe you a debt.” A debt that could not be repaid.
She wet her lower lip and nodded. Time moves on, she agreed. She wanted to ask how far back time could be rewound, if there was the possibility of going back to a specific point in time and changing something that happened. She did not ask those questions though; time was not something that should be messed around with. No matter how she might have felt about past events.
With a sigh, Wanda shook her head a little. “I- I don’t know,” she told him honestly. There was something about him that she felt she could trust.
"No one owes me anything, but...thank you for saying that," he replied, after a long moment of quietude that might qualify as an awkward pause.
All the while he was watching her. Not with scrutiny, but almost like he could see things she couldn't see. He even sat up a little straighter as though he was trying to get a closer look, while settling his back into the chair for an extended stay.
It seemed to him that she was very conflicted, and there was no doubt in his mind that it had to do with what happened with the aid workers, with Sokovia, and with whatever else it was that Stark didn't seem at all comfortable approaching during their conversation. Stark was perpetually wary of the world and everything that could happen to it, but Wanda was far more grounded that she was being given credit for.
"You're here for far more than polite conversation," he surmised. "You haven't fully explored the upper limits of your powers."
Wanda disagreed, but knew that some people were not interested in being thanked for their deeds. If the Doctor was one such person, she would respect that. She was aware of him staring at her and it made her uncomfortable, disquieted in a way that had her shifting in the chair a fraction. She took a slow breath in through her nose to suppress the powers she could feel bubbling up inside her.
“I was curious to meet the man who tore time in two,” she confessed, and that was the truth. His commentary about her not having explored the upper limits of her powers caused her eyes to narrow a little bit. Truth be told she did not understand what the upper limit of her abilities was, or even if she had uncovered them all. Sometimes she felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her abilities, always on the edge of discovering something else, something more. And that frightened her.
She pressed her lips together and then straightened up her her chair. “What would make you think that?”
Stephen raised the fingers of one hand and wriggled them toward her, still watching her closely.
"I can see it around you," he said. "It's like a web of dark red. The ebb and flow isn't consistent. It's constantly shifting."
Thankfully, Stephen stopped looking through her and looked at her. His expression was tinged with sympathy, the same way that someone who knew too much would look.
"It's ok. I don't consider you a dangerous entity," he reassured Wanda. "This is a control issue, some fine tuning, perhaps. There's ways to deal with that. Safe ways. Would you like some tea?"
He waved a hand and a cup of hot green tea was suddenly on the table next to her.
Wanda tilted her head, wondering what it was that Stephen was seeing. She lifted a hand, focusing on it and drawing a small ball of energy to hover over her outstretched palm. Her irises glowed red as she twirled it around her fingers, cutting her gaze back to looking at Stephen. He did not consider her dangerous. That was a surprise to her.
She drew the power back into herself and picked up the tea. “You are one of few people to consider that of me,” she told him honestly. She curled both hands around the small cup and lifted it to her lips, taking a sip of the tea. Surprisingly, it was just the way she liked it. She looked down into the cup with a small smile, and then returned her attention to Stephen.
“How do you do this?” she asked. “This magic.”
Stephen watched as she exerted some of her powers to show him what it looked like when summoned. It did match what he was seeing when he focused himself to do so. But no, it wasn't any more dangerous than he was, only unpredictable.
He smiled back at her in such a way, it suddenly softened all of the almost harsh and analytical expression that most people noticed most about him.
"I think it's because we both know magic, and there's so few of us that do. It's looked upon as a fringe power, far outside of what science can explain."
He held up both hands, moving them in such a way that a mandala of burning golden energy formed before him. A series of shielding sigils spun in a slow counterclockwise motion around the center point.
"It's nothing more than will and energy. There's one other here that would know quite a bit about this, like we do. But I doubt he's going to be helpful," Stephen said with a smirk. He left the shield in place, hoving between them. "This is a shield. You probably have something similar. Our magic isn't the same school, by any means. But I can help you try to focus it. If you want."
The smile that crossed Wanda’s face was bright and wide and genuine in response to Stephen’s. His confirmation that he was not afraid of her and that he respected what she could do meant more to her than she had realised. The expression lit up her entire face even as she ducked her head to try and hide it, sipping at her tea instead. She did not speak for a moment, only watched as his hands moved in a manner that looked to be rather more complicated than she thought it might need to be to create the shield that hovered in the air in front of him.
She put the tea down and lifted her left hand, holding it palm out and facing Stephen as she drew her focus to create her own shield, less impressive with no shapes or moving parts at first, just a shimmering magenta circle between them. As she focused on it more, though, she was able to at least mimic the outer shape of the one that Stephen had made.
Once her focus shifted from it, however, it disappeared. She could not yet maintain something she was not paying attention to. His casting, also, seemed far more effortless than her own.
She picked up the tea again, this time surrounding it with a red glow so that it floated from the side table and into her waiting palm. It felt good to be able to use her abilities in front of someone who would not flinch, or remind her to be careful.
“I would like that,” she told him, “And I would be interested to learn from you, if I may.”
With a wave of his hand, his own shielding faded out of existence, and he watched with interest in the ways that she was able to use her powers, and where the limits were. It was interesting how there could be similar applications, even if it was different. He wondered if the same was true with Asgardian magic, but that seemed like a closed off avenue of research, with a very unwilling participant.
Wanda wasn't unwilling, and she certainly possessed raw potential already, as well as developing a surprising amount of control where levitation was concerned. It struck him how things had changed so much from when he was sitting across from the Ancient One, eagerly wanting to learn. And now the tables had turned, and Wanda wanted to learn, just as much as he had. For self-improvement and control over themselves, not to seek power to use on others.
"I'll teach you," he replied. "Because I can offer a safe space for you, to see what you can truly do. Without harming anyone or anything else."
Wanda’s smile returned, slowly blossoming until it lit up her entire face. “I would like that very much, Doctor.” It would be good to have something to put her focus into while she worked to figure out her place.
“When should we begin?”