NOT ANOTHER TEEN MOVIE ∙ Peter Parker

✸ Chapter Twenty-Two: What's the Ultimatum?

Wanda's lips pursed together as she stared at the TV. "You don't have to do this." 

"I know I don't have to," she acknowledged, lifting her head slightly to look at Wanda. "But I want to, so I am. So we can either talk about it, I can leave, sit here and stare at this TV in silence, or put on Bewitched. My class partner and I already practiced our speech for Padmé tomorrow at lunch this afternoon...so I have all night."

Wanda had been trying to find her footing at the Avenger Facility ever since Ultron happened, and a lot of that footing was stumbling and weaving in and out of rooms like a ghost for the first few months. She'd lost her twin, and no one faulted her on the pain that she experienced from that loss.  Then, she opened up to a few people. Slowly but surely—people like Vision and Clint—but there was still grief in her heart that could never be fixed. Lizzie may not understand that grief, and never will, but what she could do was give Wanda options. One thing she refused to do was push her or make her grovel in her own misery. Lizzie knew what that did to people.

"Do you blame me?" Lizzie was stunted by that question. Wanda turned to her. "I need to know what you think." 

"You can find those answers out for yourself," she replied, knowingly. 

"I want to hear it." 

Lizzie inhaled deeply and looked over at the TV again, the destruction of Lagos playing over and over again with the visual of Wanda in clear vision from the news stations recording of it. Steve and Rumlow were there, the latter unrecognizable to most but Lizzie would never forget him. Finding out that he was alive and had survived the gunshot wound did not comfort her. There was a dark part of her, deep down, that had wished him death. Even if it was by her own hands. She turned away quickly, grimacing at the bad memories, looking down at her hands. The callouses and cuts on her fingers were laughable at that point. 

"I've been trained by undercover HYDRA agents, SHIELD agents, and Avengers in the last three years, Wanda...and the one thing that I learned from all of that is that nothing is ever black and white. There's a grey area, always," she explained, glancing up to meet Wanda's eyes. "I wasn't there. I see what the world is showing, and the news fixes things so that there's always a bad guy...do I think you're the bad guy? No. Do I think that the Avengers are bad? No...and I can't say what I would have done in that situation—but I do know that you can't hold all of those people's deaths on your heart forever. You reacted, and you tried to defuse it as best as you could. If you hadn't been there, the situation would have gone down the same. Maybe even worse. Every single one of those lives mattered. So does yours, and you can't listen to a one-sided opinion and not hear the rest."

Wanda dropped her head, looking at her own hands now. A glimmer of red was cast from her fingertips. "They're afraid of me." 

"Are you afraid of yourself?" 

The question fell on thin air.

"Yes," the older girl admitted. "And I don't know how not to be." 

"I wish I could give you better advice, but..." she sighed and grabbed a hold of Wanda's hand. The scarlet reflecting in both of their hands for a brief second before Wanda quickly stopped it. "I'm scared of my own mind sometimes—scared of the versions of me it creates and the things that run through it...but at some point, you have to look at the people who know you. Not the one-sided. Everyone believes that I'm strong, and happy, and...I am, but sometimes those other versions of myself win. I'm not afraid of you, Wanda. I step into that training room every day and never have I been afraid of you. You've wanted to help people. That is what I see. It doesn't change the way you see yourself, but...you have a home here. You're safe—and you always have a place. People will always be afraid of what they don't understand. You can't control that, but you can control your own fear."