WHAT: Carol turns to Wanda while wallowing in her misery and gets sympathy with a smidgen of tough love WHERE: Wanda's Witch Cottage WHEN: This morning WARNINGS: More sad feels because that's Carol's existence at this moment STATUS: Complete
That wasn’t an easy feat when it came to her. She ran on endless cosmic energy; she was up with sun every day, and there were frequent nights she didn’t sleep at all because she just didn’t need it. She didn’t tire. She didn’t break. She was the Space Stone personified, always alive, always existing, and she’d go on that way for who knew how long.
This was a different kind of exhaustion. An emotional drain that felt bone-deep and unshakeable. Tony and Pepper had done their best to comfort her yesterday, and she’d eased out of that funk for a while, but it had been touch and go all night. She’d even been able to brush off Emmeline’s concerned prodding and insist, she felt pretty convincingly, that she’d just had a tough workout with Tony, that was all.
But she’d woken up back in a state this morning. She’d put on her best face for Emme and Kamala, but as soon as they were out the door, she had called off her Defense shift. She hadn’t paced the living room floor for long, trying not to think, before she realized it was better if she wasn’t alone.
That was how she ended up at Wanda’s door in yoga pants and a loose, well-worn Nirvana t-shirt, hair pulled back in the loosest interpretation of a bun, looking like a mess with vaguely red-rimmed eyes. Even without explanation (because she didn’t know, nobody but Pepper really knew), her friend had taken pity on her, and next thing she knew, she was on the couch with a gigantic bowl of popcorn taking up the entirety of her lap.
“So, what do we watch when we’re feeling sorry for ourselves?” she asked Wanda. She wouldn’t know; she’d never had time or brainspace to do it before.
Was this wallowing?
Yes, this was wallowing. Wanda was a professional at it. Instead of giving into reality-warping grief that was so explosive she could enslave a whole town and make its citizens her own personal Barbie, the fine act of being one with a comfortable couch in equally comfortable sweats was a much kinder, much safer option. She had no plans for it today. There was no reason for her to be in a depressive state where she pitied herself, but clearly Carol had penciled it in for today’s agenda.
That was fine. She did not mind it. Carol, showing up unannounced at her doorstep looking suspiciously weepy, seemed to need it. As for the why, though - Wanda didn’t know.
She was worried, though.
“I used to watch some black and white classics,” she mused, dragging her friend’s ankles onto her lap. There was no remote needed when it came to Wanda - she could manipulate the channels and streaming services with her mind effortlessly. “But Tommy and Billy introduced me to more modern ones, and I have a soft spot for Parks and Recreation. It’s insane, but wholesome. Then you nap between episodes.”
Carol didn’t fight Wanda’s hands around her ankles. She was quickly sinking into the soft cushions, slouched and comfortable, head lolling across the top. She popped a few pieces of popcorn into her mouth to crunch on and watched the TV whoosh through the streaming services seemingly unassisted, then turned her eyes back to Wanda.
“I’ll probably skip the naps. Not really that kind of tired.” Maybe, though. A depression nap sounded kind of appealing, actually; she’d stayed in bed last night, despite having plenty more room to roam during her awake nights, but her sleep had been restless and riddled with upset. She was sure Emme had noticed, always such a light sleeper, but she’d let her deal with it herself. She’d pulled away so much since all of this had resurfaced, and Carol couldn’t even blame her. Unfortunately, much as she’d like to think otherwise, she’d been handling all of it badly.
“Pass on the classics.” She’d grown up with quite a few of those, before color television really kicked in, and she’d seen enough of them. “Parks and Recreation sounds good, though. I’ve seen some of it.”
Parks and Recreation was always funny and uplifting. That was what Wanda sought out for when it came to television shows to semi-focus on; something with light and hope and laughs. It would be counterproductive to put anything else on that would have dragged her down the depths of her own grief.
“Starting with season two,” she told Carol. “Ben Wyatt is a treasure.”
Wanda blinked once, and it began to play.
Scorpia had the shop handled, they had the cottage to themselves, and if they wanted anything she could flick her wrist and make the kitchen do her bidding as if it had a life of its own. Moving off this couch was for bathroom breaks only.
Once the opening credits rolled and they were ten minutes deep into the episode, Wanda pulled at Carol’s big toe. “I want to ask you something.”
Carol nodded, trusting Wanda’s judgment on these things. She’d never been the girl who sat around watching TV for hours, even before she’d gotten caught up in alien business. She wanted to be up, out, active, having adventures. She’d found a new rhythm here in Vallo, and that had changed a bit. There were times it was nice to cozy up with someone she loved and just enjoy the same thing in the same moment and be comfortable together, and especially today, it felt oddly like exactly what she needed.
The show was cute. Insane but wholesome was an apt description, and it was easy to fall into it and feel that tug of amusement, lessening if not completely banishing the bad thoughts and feelings. She was content enough working her way through handfuls of popcorn with Wanda by her side. She knew she would have to explain, eventually, but she was in no hurry.
But with that little tug to her toe, she had a feeling the inquiries were coming. Fair enough; it wasn’t every day, or really any day, that she just dropped in on her friend, especially now that she was finding a new little domestic bliss for herself. She turned her gaze back to Wanda. “Alright,” she agreed. “Ask me something.”
Carol could have declined, and Wanda would have respected it - but if she was creating an opening, she would take it. “You don’t wallow,” was what she began with, keeping her eyes glued to the television. She had watched these episodes dozens of times. Often, she let her astral form roam about and catch up on books and television while her body slept because why not use it that way?
“Does being here have anything to do with the fact that you and Emme haven’t set a date for the wedding yet?”
Ouch. Carol sighed. One of the things she loved about Wanda was that, when she wanted to be, she was completely no holds barred. As someone who’d often had to be the same way – blunt to the point of rudeness – she respected and appreciated it. That didn’t mean it didn’t hurt like hell, and really, it was a miracle she didn’t physically flinch.
“Not exactly,” came her answer, her thumb moving to the ring on her finger to twirl it self-consciously. They’d been so eager to set a wedding date after first getting engaged. But, as it so often went with Vallo, things had started getting crazy pretty quickly. And even after the crazy passed, it had been pushed down the priority list in favor of the house hunt. For all she knew, at this point, the wedding was entirely off the list. She couldn’t say she’d be surprised if Emme decided she wasn’t worth it after all this.
Not exactly didn’t explain much, but when Wanda finally let her eyes fall to her, she saw the way Carol toyed with her ring. She could recognize the guilt, and even - shame, perhaps? There were times she looked at her own rings with the same feelings; the one Stephen had proposed to her with (when he dropped it in snow by accident, she remembered so vividly) and the one he had slipped on her finger on the mountainside.
Vision was here, and she loved Vision. That couldn’t be disputed even if her (late?) husband was still around. But she still hadn’t taken them off, and she played with their presence often.
“I sensed a shift,” Wanda said, vague at first. “Billy would call it a ‘disturbance in the force.’ It is something like that, I suppose. I feel the people close to me, and that is harder to turn off than peeking into someone’s mind.” Cracking open someone’s psyche to read their thoughts and drink their fears wasn’t anything she did now unless absolutely necessary - and she especially did not do that with friends. “You were ready to marry Emme the night you proposed to her, and then something… changed?”
“No.” Her response was immediate and forceful but maybe not entirely truthful. Wanda was right; something had changed. The night she’d proposed, if Emme had wanted to, she’d have married her on the spot, right then and there. She loved her, and she could see this clear, wonderful life ahead of them together. But it had become infinitely more complicated – at least on Carol’s end, with that overflow of feelings she’d locked away suddenly uncaged and impossible to rein in.
She had never had so little control over her feelings. The closest she’d come to feeling this emotionally shredded was the day she’d lost Maria, and she hated it. She hated feeling this way, knowing how selfish she was being, knowing that she was chipping away at Emmeline, too. And now knowing Wanda was tuned into her enough to feel that, even if it was just a fraction of what she’d been feeling, that was even more to process.
“I love Emme,” she continued quietly. “I want to marry her, I do. I’ve just–” She cut herself off with a puff of air and straightened up, pulling her legs off Wanda’s lap to plant them firmly on the ground. The bowl of popcorn was pushed off onto the coffee table, and the show they’d been watching was completely forgotten. Her focus was fully on Wanda now; it wasn’t fair not to tell her what was going on when the inkling was already there.
“Back home, after the Snap, that was the first time I’d been to Earth in a long time. It was the first time I’d met any of the Avengers and it was how I joined the team. Natasha and I, we got close. The boys were being…boys, and I could see she was struggling, so I stayed at the Compound with her for a long time. I wanted to support her. And…we fell in love.”
She had to stop and take a breath there, raking one hand down her cheek and watching to see Wanda’s reaction so far. It wasn’t the whole story, and it wasn’t quite the reason she was here today, but it was necessary background to get there.
This is what Wanda would consider a ‘plot twist.’
“Huh,” was what she said first, processing. Thinking. Natasha had arrived with memories not of their timeline, and that hadn’t seemed to complicate anything now that she looked back. But then Natasha did get those memories, and with that, she presumably got–
“Huh,” Wanda repeated, picking at her nails with her thumb as she cocked her head to the side, still thinking. Natasha had died. Carol surely mourned in secret, which was… heartbreaking to consider. “You’re very emotionally pent up, then.”
“Yeah,” Carol chuckled, the sound mirthless but not harsh. Just tired. Drained. Her chest felt tight and overinflated at the same time, had since the moment she’d left Natasha the day before, and she’d hoped it would have passed by now. “Losing her almost broke me, so…I blocked it all out. Shoved it into the back of my mind and made myself forget about it as much as I could.”
She shook her head. She knew that hadn’t been the healthy choice, and she was paying for it now. The grief had felt like it might kill her the first time she’d read the letter Nat had left for her. She’d spent far too many nights alone in her room on her ship reading that letter over and over, fuelling her anger, fuelling all the ‘what-ifs’ that filled her brain. She hadn’t felt anything close to it since losing Maria, and she couldn’t afford to feel it, not with half the universe returning and her presence needed elsewhere.
“It wasn’t so bad when she wasn’t my Nat. The first one here, she had that thing with–” She stopped again, going still as her brain connected those dots. The previous Nat had been seeing Steve after Thanos. Then this Nat, her Nat, she still hadn’t been hers at first. She’d been from an entirely different timeline, one closer to Tony’s and Pepper’s than their own. And then she’d had those memories shoved into her head, and she was Carol’s Nat – until she was Steve’s, again.
She had no right to be so fucking annoyed by that, but she was, and she was sure it was plain on her face.
“Anyway.” She started fresh again, stretching her hands and flexing her fingers, subtly coaxing herself back toward calm. “Having her back unlocked all of that, and I haven’t been handling it well. I’ve had it in my head that she’s still mine when she’s not, and Em…she’s gotten the shaft. But I’m gonna fix it.”
“I know you’re going to fix it,” Wanda told her with confidence. There were no winners here. She didn’t need to emphasize the whole our lives aren’t normal part, they all knew that - and it brought complexities to all their relationships, not just the romantic ones. Emmeline was an innocent bystander in this and presumably had to watch her fiancée struggle with her feelings for someone else. That couldn’t feel pleasant by any means.
So, yes, if Carol loved Emme and wanted to continue what they had - something had to be done. You can’t sweep this kind of thing under the rug no matter how hard she tried at the very beginning of it.
“But,” she sighed, pushing her fingers up her red hair and raking them down until they reached the end. “You should allow yourself the time to grieve it. I don’t think you had the chance to properly let it go before - and you need to do that for you. I used to hate it when people mentioned the five stages of grief to me, like there was a formula to what I was feeling, yet…”
There was truth to it. The denial. The anger. The bargaining and depression (that Carol seemed to be going through). Acceptance was the hardest part. Carol wasn’t grieving for Natasha in the sense of her death right now. More like - she was grieving what could have been theirs if life hadn’t been cruel, and that was a feeling she knew all too well. “There’s truth to it.”
Wanda’s confidence in her was a boost Carol had needed more than she’d even realized until she had it. She would fix it. She was determined to fix it. She meant it when she said she loved Emmeline. Even yesterday in the gym, when Nat told her Emme made her happy, of course it was true. That had never been a doubt in her mind. The problem was – well, she was sure it was a doubt in Emme’s now, and that meant it was going to be a tough fix. But they would get through it.
God, she hoped they would get through it.
“I’m working on it,” she acknowledged with a grim little smile. “The grieving, the…letting go. Natasha told me yesterday that she was seeing Steve.” She didn’t hold back on names. She was sure Wanda, of all people, already knew that. If she didn’t, now she would. “Kind of shattered whatever illusions that were still in my head about us, sent me spiraling.”
She was still spiraling, that was what had landed her here. Part of her felt like it was over before they’d had a real chance – even though, really, they’d been together a good four years, unofficially, before the Blip and Natasha’s sacrifice. It was that possibility, that we’re not done yet feeling, that had put her on this path, and it was Nat’s very matter-of-fact removal of that possibility that had put her where she was now. Feeling hurt and angry but also guilty and selfish and ashamed.
She pushed her hands up the length of her face and bowed her head, speaking more to her feet than to Wanda next. “I want her to be happy,” she said softly. “I just thought it would be with me.”
“Natasha is happy,” Wanda pointed out. “Happier than I have seen her be. That is thanks to several people - and I’m sure you are one of them but not how you had hoped you’d be, and that is a pill you have to swallow if you plan on moving forward. You have one foot stuck in the past. As long as that foot stays there, you can’t fix it with Emme.”
Carol probably knew all this, really. People were their own worst critics and there wasn’t a doubt in her mind that she was giving herself some deep lashes over this - but maybe someone else being a firm hand to tell her would snap her out of this daze.
That didn’t need to happen right this instant. She was wallowing. That was allowed. That was part of the process.
“So you will sit here and watch brain-rotting television with me for the rest of the day.” Wanda’s hand splayed over her back after having scooched a little closer. “And tomorrow you will take the steps - even if they are baby ones - towards setting things right with your fiancée. It won’t happen overnight. Natasha will be fine. Emme is the one that needs to know you are still all in and that you always were.”
Wanda’s speech wasn’t quite a pep talk, but it was a push, just shy of a shove, in the direction Carol needed to go. It was where she wanted to go, but it was true: she was stuck in the past. She had been shoved into the ocean with that foot of hers wrapped in a concrete boot, and instead of fighting it and dragging it along until she could find the strength to break it, she had let it take her strength entirely. She had let it start to sink her, slowly but steadily.
Nat was right. Pepper was right. Wanda was right. She needed to refocus. She needed to stop thinking about Natasha, about the shot she’d lost out on, and she needed to focus on the shot she still had. Might still have, if Emme had it in her heart to look past the way she’d been behaving. Her fiancée was saint-like, but she had her limits. It felt very possible that she would say see ya instead of letting Carol attempt to make things right. House or no house. Engagement or no engagement.
She needed time to get to that place, to drag herself out of the water and find a way to shatter the boot. It wasn’t going to be simple. It was going to take time. But she would get there. Right now, it felt nice to have a day – even if it was just one more – to sit in how much the feelings sucked with someone she loved as much as she loved Wanda.
“Tomorrow,” she agreed. She tilted her head down to rest against Wanda’s, shifting her arm to wrap around her waist and pull her in closer. “Thanks, Wanda. Love you.”
“Love you too,” she echoed, pressing a kiss to her temple. Wanda’s words weren’t exactly soft blows but her friend needed refuge from everything, and she was glad she had come to her. Carol had been with her through the aftermath of Stephen’s disappearance so she’d be there for anything, especially this.
Leaning back into the couch, she helped guide Carol to lay down, head meant to land on her lap. “Get comfortable. Keep watching this. Take a nap. I will make you something sweet later - maybe a pie with some ice cream to throw on top.”
Wanda blinked, and the oven in the kitchen began pre-heating. She could make it from here while her hands were occupied with petting Carol’s hair.
Carol let herself be coaxed back down, pulling her feet up and sprawling out across the remaining length of the couch. She curled up on Wanda’s lap, a hand tucked up under her cheek and the back of her head rolled back against her friend’s stomach. A quiet breath whooshed out of her and she started to relax, leaning into those fingers stroking through her hair and quickly getting cozy under her touch.
“You make the best pies,” she murmured, exhaling again as the tension in her body kept on ebbing away. Her eyes flickered back to the TV, but she felt fuzzy around the edges. It wasn’t long before her eyes began to feel heavy, and she slowly dozed off, safe and content for the moment.