Fire and Smoke - Wanda Maximoff x Reader

Chapter 39

And that's the thing with grief, no matter where you go or how far away you move in time, it just follows you, and you never know when you'll turn a corner and come face to face with that grief again. It sneaks up on you, and when it's upon you it's just as debilitating as the first time you met. And Wanda, she's had to meet grief too many times to be able to separate herself from it. She's learned to live in some sort of symbiosis with it. Sometimes she's Wanda, sometimes she's her grief, but mostly she's a gray twilight made up of both, with no discernible shapes or shadows to distinguish herself anymore. And it's exhausting to keep looking.

And that's the reason I cannot shake the feeling of guilt from my shoulders. I am the thing standing between her and her possibly shedding some of that grief and allowing maybe even just some ray of light in. I know I am, and she knows it very well too, and it's eating me up inside and I don't know what to do.

"But you can. So why won't you?"

Those words she spoke to me are the words that keep repeating in my head no matter how I try to intellectualize the situation. I can. I can help her. Why won't I? She said it too; I could prevent anything bad from ever happening to my family. What kind of a person am I if I don't at least try to protect and to save them?

And this has been the way my day has been spent. On the couch, feeling like the worst human on earth for keeping Wanda away from her family, and from failing my own family once and now not even trying to rectify my mistake. But I'm so scared. What if we do go back and we fail? What if we go back and we succeed, and I lose Wanda, because now she'll have the people she loves around her, and she won't need me?

"Shit." I sigh and get off the couch, resorting to pacing around the small living room.

The cabin is so constricting, like a straight jacket, and I just need to move and to breathe, and some space between me and Wanda and my stupid, confusing feelings about the whole situation, and about her.

I grab a sweater Wanda has discarded on her side of the couch and then I head out, not bothering to tell Wanda I'm going. She'll feel it anyway, no need for words. I'm only going for a while, and anyway, she's the one who's clearly not wanting to see me right now, so she'll be happy with some space too, I assume.

I lose myself in my thoughts once again as my body automatically falls into a brisk jog as I step off the porch and onto the grass. My body comes alive with relief at being allowed to move without any pain once again. Were I back at home in New York, I might've made my way to my usual bar to help quiet the thoughts that way, but sadly here I fall back on the next best thing; figuratively and literally running away from my problems.

I let my feet decide the way as I again mull over the realization that I actually went back in time twice already and nothing seemed to have changed. If one decides to go back in time, doesn't that mean that one has always made that decision and so one cannot change the present as the present has already been changed?

Fuck, I really should have taken some more philosophy classes or something in college. Who knew time conundrums would be something I would have to worry about. I miss having to only worry about where my gasoline-drinking madwoman would strike next.

I also keep thinking back on my time in New York with the Avengers. That was real, too, apparently. I met the Avengers. In the flesh. Like, what? I lived with them, trained with them, ate with them, and fought beside them. That happened. Who knew that was something I could claim? And if that is true, could I go back again, and would they remember me?

Probably, it isn't every day you meet someone who can play with time, is it? Maybe it isn't something so out of the ordinary in the Avenger's lives.