Wanda felt fragile. Exposed. Strangely calm. Something inside of her was straining, like a branch of a tree bent almost past tolerance, something inside of her was shattered into tiny shards of memory and fear, and she knew she had to pick up the pieces...but not yet. She listened to Buffy instead, feeling as if she was very far away. The buzz of fear and adrenaline that had rushed through her when she realized she was projecting slowly faded, like a firework that blazed and dissipated.
Buffy was talking, and Wanda could hear the words, or at least the sense of them. Buffy was talking about her own experiences, she thought, but she heard echoes of her own grief and pain, and not just with her ears.
Her mental armor was fading too, and she didn't call it back, but peeked out through the chinks, looking for fear and anger and not finding it in Buffy.
She didn't know what to say, but a tendril of gratitude and wonder flowed out of her, and she thought that Buffy picked it up. She tried not to sully it with fear.
"I am so sorry about..." Wanda made a gesture, trying to encompass the mental connection she'd made. But she was also strangely satisfied; she could feel Pietro in Buffy's thoughts. She'd told the story without words, and she shouldn't have, but she was glad -- fiercely, jaggedly glad.
"I do not know what is okay," she admitted. "I do not know. But..." She shook her head, and touched her heart as Buffy had. "Thank you."
Moved by an impulse before she had time to doubt it, Wanda quickly leaned forward and gave Buffy a brief hug, feeling like Buffy needed comfort too. Comfort because of what Wanda had just done to her, or because of the vaguely sensed shadows of sorrows and losses in her past as well-- "I am so sorry," Wanda breathed. But she had to pull back abruptly, before her thoughts and emotions flared into frenzied life and overflowed out of her again. That didn't need a repeat.