Havoc | Peter Parker ¹ ✓

4 | consequences

The younger girl releases a breath from her mouth— a trembling exhale, just like the rest of her. "I've been scared. I'm not ashamed of fear, but I've never felt fear like — like this."

Like we're fighting a battle we can never hope to win. The thought crosses her mind before she can stop it.

"I understand," Wanda says with a nod. "Bruce told me about you— the little bit he knows, at least. Your powers... they are not much unlike my own. I know what it's like to feel like they are controlling you more than you are controlling them." She casts a pointed glance at Lena's bouncing leg and twiddling thumbs. "I was made as well. The difference is that it was my choice. But this..." Raising a delicate hand, she forms a ball of red-tinted power in her palm before twirling it around her slender fingers, "it didn't feel like me until recently. Steve is better at the whole speech thing, but I guess what I am trying to say is that you cannot let your powers take control of you. If you do, they win."

Lena holds up her own hand and copies Wanda's actions of pooling energy into her palm. The blue tint makes the woman raise an interested eyebrow.

"I'm... unstable," she admits with some thought. "Tony was trying to help me reach equilibrium, but obviously we didn't do that quite yet. Sometimes I feel more thing than girl, if that makes sense."

She nods. "You will get there."

Lena chooses to believe that.

"We'll be landing in five," Steve announces to the occupants of the quinjet, scanning his royal-blue eyes over each face. "Everyone buckle up."

Wanda retreats back to her seat across the aisle as Lena fumbles for her seat belt. Bruce appears from some back area and resumes his place to her right. His lack of a greeting means that something must be bothering him, but what, she isn't sure.

She clutches the seat belt until her knuckles are white and the bones are prominent beneath her skin. The descent of the jet isn't bumpy by any means, but she does feel her ears beginning to pop as Sam aims the aircraft downward. Her heart jumps into her throat at the realization that they're flying straight toward a mountain—

"I hope you're right about this, or we're gonna land a lot faster than you want to," Sam says tensely, but his trust in Steve proves to weigh more than his fear, because he doesn't change direction and instead flies closer to the giant structure.

Lena's body instinctively tenses, bracing herself for an impact that never comes. She pops an eye open to see that her surroundings have transformed. Instead of seeing nothing but open farmland, she discovers an entire metropolis that's smaller than her New York but infinitely more advanced. A train flies on a raised track that makes it snake around the towering skyscrapers that seemed to have appeared out of thin air. Her jaw drops at the sight of the technology. She'd known that Wakanda had decided to open its resources to the rest of the world, but this...

She turns to see Bruce's face still screwed up as if he's unaware that they aren't flying at a mountain anymore. Lena gently nudges him. He shakes his head and opens his eyes, which immediately widen at the sights around him.

They continue their descent and Lena has to peel her gaze away from the window at the front of the jet in order to focus on getting herself out of the chair. Unbuckling her seat belt, she slowly eases herself to her feet once the jet has come to a complete stop. Her hands curl into fists to calm their shaking. She's about to meet royalty. The Black Panther. Peter had told her a little about him during one of their study sessions.

She can see it like it happened yesterday. Peter, reclining on her bed as he'd tossed an eraser into the air mindlessly. He was mostly fighting Mr. Barnes the whole time. I don't know why, but I do know that I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of those claws.