Look What You Made Me Do (Wanda-SI/OC)

Natasha gazed absently through the window. Her eyes wandered over the pristine forested tableau below them toward the shining city of Birnin Zana, the country’s capital, its borders pressed right up against the greenery maybe thirty miles away. In the fading, early-evening light, Nat could see why the locals called it the Golden City, its skyscrapers almost glowing with the reflected light of the sun. Wakanda in general was stunningly beautiful. Their culture and art were integrated into everything at the basest level, it seemed. It wasn’t exactly Natasha’s style—she preferred simple, functional things for the most part—but that didn’t mean she couldn’t appreciate it.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Steve asked as he sat down on the other side of the table, across from Bucky, placing his food down on the table.

Nat glanced in his direction, but Clint, sitting across from her, interjected before she could answer. “Let me guess: pining for the fjords?”

“Absolutely,” she said, turning back to the window.

The four of them were in the Great Mound’s main cafeteria, a wide space that took up the entire second floor of the aboveground portion of the facility. Along one wall was a service counter, now empty, and tables and chairs lay artfully scattered around the place. They fed their scientists well here—the food was great, similar in style to some other African cultures Natasha had spent time with, but she hadn’t been particularly hungry and the now-cold jollof rice in front of her had been left mostly uneaten.

The ground-level main security entrance lay pretty much directly below them, right next to the circular open-air void of the main mineshaft. As Nat watched, a dragon flyer appeared in the sky, the rear half of it folding down as it descended toward the facility. She moved her hand slightly to touch the glass, feeling a faint vibration glass from the aircraft’s engines as it moved past the window.

Seven landing bays for the unusual aircraft were spaced around the rim of the mineshaft, with the one currently descending joining four more of its fellows. Four larger landing pads for other airborne vehicles were arrayed to either side of the deceptively small-seeming building they were currently in. As the flyer landed, the vibration in the glass died away entirely and Natasha removed her hand.

A pair of Dora Milaje still kept a careful watch on them from nearby—far enough away that they could talk without feeling like everything they said was being overheard, but close enough to remind them that they weren’t trusted enough to be given free rein of the place. It was late enough in the day that most of the facility staff seemed to have already headed off, leaving only a skeleton crew for the evening, not that that really mattered to the Avengers.

The Wakandans were still relatively stand-offish with them, despite Nat’s attempts at incidental conversation to set them more at ease. Wakanda was a xenophobic, insular nation, far beyond any other she had experience with; though many spoke English and other languages in addition to their native tongue, foreigners were almost utterly alien to them. As far as she was able to tell, there were no other non-Wakandans in Wakanda. Zero. Zilch.

“I’ve been thinking,” Nat said slowly. “About Wanda.”

“Huh.” Clint put on an exaggerated expression of surprise. “I’d never have expected that.”

She shoved his shoulder gently and shot him an exasperated smile. “About what she told us.”

“You mean the version of her life she saw in her visions?” Steve asked. “The Scarlet Witch?”

“That’s part of it, but… Wanda’s never really spoken about how she experienced her visions. What they actually looked and felt like from her perspective. There’s been some things, here and there, that I found odd. I’d always thought that she’d developed parasocial relationships with us from having witnessed whatever she saw of our lives, but I think it might be more than that.”

“More how?” Bucky asked, leaning forward slightly.

“I think the thing that tipped me off first was the TV shows. We saw something that had just been released and she wanted to show it to me, but the way she talked about it was like she’d already sat and watched the whole thing.”

“That is a really specific thing to have had visions of,” Steve mused.

“I think she might have lived them, somehow. It might explain why she feels so disconnected from the other set of memories she has. Her other life. When she woke up, after being empowered by the Mind Stone, she thought she wasn’t actually Wanda, that she was this whole other person that she also had memories of instead.”

“Has she talked to you much about her other life?” Bucky asked. “I asked her about it once and she just told me it didn’t matter.”

“She’s pretty much avoided talking about it completely.” Nat frowned and shook her head. “There are some things—little details that have come out—but I don’t want to talk about them behind her back when she’s obviously not comfortable sharing.”

“Fair,” said Clint, picking idly at his food.

“That doesn’t explain all the stuff that she wasn’t there for, though,” Bucky pointed out. “She said she saw us during the War and Carol when she came to Earth in the nineties. Wakanda and Kamar-taj, too.”

Natasha shook her head again. “I think it’s an issue of granularity. We’ve been talking about her visions like they were these high-level, abstract things, but I think she might have just… seen everything. Subjectively experienced literal decades of time.”

“She was an utter wreck when she told us what happened with Vision and her kids,” Steve said quietly. “Pietro dying, too. It was tearing her up even talking about it. You don’t react like that to something you didn’t live through.”

“Exactly,” Nat said.

A sombre silence descended over the table while everyone finished eating. Natasha looked back out over the Wakanda landscape outside, then a small flicker in the corner of her eye caught her attention. Just below her, outside, she could have sworn there’d been one of the facility’s staff walking along toward one of the landed dragon flyers, but he’d vanished into thin air.

A moment later, she saw light spill out as the main entrance beneath where they sat opened. She waited, watching, but no one came out. The doors closed again after a minute and she frowned. That was odd. It could be that whoever was leaving had stopped and turned around because they’d forgotten something, but something about it itched at the back of her mind.

Moving her hand slightly, Nat touched the reinforced glass of the window gently with her fingertips. There was a faint vibration running through it again, weaker than before—barely noticeable, even—but present. Lots of possible explanations. This was a scientific facility with all sorts of projects, vibranium transmitted kinetic energy extremely easily… still. She glanced across the table at Clint, who was also looking outside, his brow furrowed. He noticed her look and narrowed his eyes in a silent question: Something seem off to you?

Natasha nodded, the movement barely noticeable, as the door on the far side of the room, leading to the spiralling ramp that ran through the facility top-to-bottom, slid open. The Dora nearest the door glanced toward it, but no one came through—the hallway beyond seemingly empty—and the door closed again after standing open for a minute or two. Nat felt her body tense. Something was definitely going on. She had no idea what, but her hackles were raised, every well-honed spycraft instinct telling her that they were in imminent danger.

Frowning, she looked across the table at Bucky, who had a similar expression on his face. Their eyes met, then—in a blur of motion—he suddenly lunged across the table, metal arm outstretched in front of Steve’s face.

There was the ringing sound of metal on metal, then Bucky curled his arm as if trapping something between his forearm and bicep before lashing out with the fist of his free hand, seemingly impacting something invisible. Steve ducked out of his seat, one hand scooping up his shield as he tumbled across the floor in a short roll before coming back up on his feet. “What?!” Surprise and concern were written across his face as he stumbled back, slightly off-balance.

Nat similarly slid down under the table, narrowly avoiding something passing through the empty air where her head had been a moment earlier as it bit heavily into the back of her seat. She lashed out with her foot, aimed for where someone would have been standing if they’d been trying to kill her with a melee weapon, and was gratified by the crunch of someone’s shin as she felt a bone break. There was only the barest grunt of pain in response, which was odd, but she scrambled under the table and out the other side, putting some distance between her and whoever she’d just hit.

Across the room, at essentially the exact same time, one of the Dora Milaje guarding them had gone down in a spray of blood, a vicious-looking wound splitting the side of her neck. The second royal guardswoman barely managed to react in time, bringing her spear up to defend herself against an unseen attacker, but then went down to one knee as something tore a gash in the back of her other leg. A moment later and the Dora’s head was separated from her shoulders as though she’d been decapitated by a single, smooth strike from a blade.

Clint grabbed at something unseen, wrestling for a moment, then seemed to hit empty air with a blow that crushed someone’s windpipe. He stumbled backward, something striking him in the chest, then barely managed to avoid another attack, grunting in pain as a long, shallow gash appeared along his bare bicep. There was another ring of metal-on-metal as Steve deflected something off the edge of his shield, then he threw it through the air—it bounced off the reinforced window, sweeping through the space behind Clint and deflecting off at an unexpected angle as it struck something.

There was the faintest whisper of something through the air in front of Natasha and she spun to the side, moving out of the way before bringing her hand down in a disabling strike. She hit nothing but empty air, whomever was attacking her twisting out of the way of the attack.

Bucky similarly swung his arm uselessly through the air, but turned the miss into a grab that snatched Steve’s shield out of the air. He spun on his heel, swinging the weapon in a wide arc around him, and there was a whunk as it impacted another unseen attacker. As he turned toward Steve he released his grip—the shield flew true, but slammed into another invisible assailant on its way through, who was knocked forward into Steve’s waiting backhand.

Steve scrambled to scoop his shield up and joined up with the rest of them in the centre of the room. All four Avengers fell into alert stances, their backs to each other in a defensive ring, vigilant to any further attacks. There was a moment of silence as they looked around, eyes wild.

“What the hell is going on?” Clint growled, frustrated.

“Very impressive,” said a heavily-accented voice, seemingly coming from nowhere. Japanese, Natasha thought. She strained her senses, trying to detect any trace of their invisible foes. “I’d thought perhaps the stories about you were exaggerated, however, I can see that is clearly not the case. Red Queen… drop our cover, please.”

“Really?” said a slightly incredulous voice that sounded exactly like Wanda’s. Which meant the AI was behind this. It had to be. “You really want to do it like this?”

“Assassins strike from the shadows, but we are also warriors. Our first strike failed. The Hand has traditions that must be respected. They have proven themselves worthy opponents that will not be felled easily. It would be remiss for us not to face them honourably.”

“Fine. Your funeral.” There was a visual distortion in the air, like a glitch on a video screen, as whatever cloaking tech was being used dropped away. Four figures stood in a loose circle around the Avengers, with another half-dozen fallen attackers, clad in all-black suits and lying splayed in various positions around them, either unconscious or dead.

Directly in front of Natasha were two men that were rather ordinary-looking compared to their fellows, their clothes plain but functional: they both wore heavy laced combat boots, but other than that their outfits were mismatched and wouldn’t have looked out of place working in a warehouse. One wore a simple patterned bandana across his forehead, while the other had a beanie covering his bald head. Each of them held a long, vicious‑looking combat knife at the ready.

“Looks like the Bride has already chosen her prey,” the bald one remarked idly, his accent vaguely Eastern European but light enough to not be immediately identifiable.

“He just looks so delicious, I couldn’t help myself. I could eat him right up.” The Korean woman who had spoken was to Nat’s left, facing off against Bucky as she leaned over a table, wearing an entirely black outfit: a tight corset that emphasised her assets, long black skirt, fingerless gloves that reached up past her elbows, and a thin black choker around her neck. Her hair was up in a pair of buns, and she wore a lot of jewellery.

On the face of it, the way she was dressed was immensely impractical for fighting in, but Nat had fought plenty in similar outfits before and could pick up at a glance the tell-tale signs that it had been customised to allow for a proper range of movement. Though the woman appeared unarmed, Natasha was also willing to bet she was covered in concealed weapons.

Nat risked a quick glance around, assessing the rest of their assailants.

To her right, facing Clint, was a man in a body-concealing martial artist outfit, dark, bloody-red in colour, with a hood and a concealing mask drawn across the lower half of his face. He stood in a ready combat stance with what Nat recognised as a kyoketsu-shoge, the weapon’s blade held in one hand with its long chain taut against his elbow and forearm. It was an unusual weapon, one normally associated with ninja. He certainly looked the part, at least, as did the black-suited figures that they’d already taken down.

Behind her, facing Steve, was a greasy-looking guy with Japanese features and a small, weedy goatee. He was dressed in black body armour reminiscent of biker leathers, and held a long naginata in a loose grip as he grinned. “Looks like I’m stuck with the prancing show pony. Let’s get this over with quickly so I can find a real warrior to fight.”

“And that means we get the Widow,” the man with the bandana in front of Natasha scoffed. “The assassin trained by the Red Room.”

“Who betrayed the Red Room,” said his partner.

“And took down SHIELD,” the first one continued. “Or was it HYDRA?”  They both had small traces of Russian accents, but there was something else odd about the way they spoke, as if the whole thing was one, continuous sentence rather than two of the speaking separately.

“Who cares anyway? Because I’m going to be the one who puts the Black Widow into a body bag.”

The bald one licked his lips. “No, I think it’s going to be me.”

“Lotta bragging going on here for two big strong boys teaming up on a girl,” Natasha quipped.

“Except we aren’t two,” he responded easily, an odd intensity to his gaze.

“We are one,” finished the other. Simultaneously—their movements almost exactly mirroring one another—they raised their knives and settled into easy combat stances.

There was a moment of near silence as each of the Avengers faced off against the opponents that had chosen them. A vibration passed through the floor beneath their feet, a distant boom that seemed to make the entire facility shiver. It was almost like a signal, and the arrayed fighters exploded into motion.

 

--

 

T’Challa watched as Tony Stark looked over Shuri’s latest code, a complex structure projected holographically in the air in front of him, his expression critical. “It’s not going to work.”

“The structure is polymorphic; it’s our best shot at dealing with her. We can handle it, I’m sure,” Shuri insisted.

“Right, if we attach each node cluster individually, which’ll take forever. We’ll need trillions of them.”

“It won’t take forever if we program them to work collectively and self-replicate.” Shuri grinned triumphantly as though she’d just said the smartest thing in the world.

“Oh, yeah, we can totally do that if we want to risk turning the entire internet into copies of our code, sure.”

Her grin faded and she rolled her eyes. “Not infinitely, moron. We can add restrictions.”

“Restrictions can be bypassed,” Stark told her, shaking his head. Despite the fact that he was shooting down her idea, he sounded pleased. “It’s a clever solution, but remember that what we’re making is intended to be inherently unpredictable and unstable—we could end up with a code mutation that causes more problems than it solves.”

Shuri huffed, dismissing the holographic display. “Fine. I’ll think of something else.”

T’Challa found himself smiling slightly despite himself as he watched the exchange. Shuri wasn’t used to interacting with someone who was solidly on the same level of intellect and skill as her—she had pulled far, far ahead of even her senior tutors before she was fourteen years old. While she’d initially expressed doubts as to how much ‘an old man with backwards technology’ would be able to contribute, Stark had quickly proven why he had a reputation in the outside world as one of the smartest men alive.

Even Dr Banner had surprised them with his insights—though he was best known as a radiologist, the man had seven PhDs, including in radiophysics, engineering, robotics, computer science, and mathematics, and was able to keep up with the two savants and add his own contributions. The doctor was almost at the opposite end of the room from them, past the spiral ramp in the centre, standing next to the tall windows looking out on the vibranium mines as he pored over another data readout on a screen of his own.

It made T’Challa think… how much more advanced could they be, if Wakanda wasn’t so hostile to outsiders? If they engaged in more information sharing, it would risk their country’s technological advantage over the rest of the world, but Stark and Banner were already here, and the benefits that it could potentially bring…

Out of nowhere, an alarm klaxon of some kind began sounding overhead, knocking him out of his musings. The type of tone was completely unfamiliar to T’Challa. He looked up as the lights around them flickered for a moment, then returned to normal, which was extremely odd. For an actual alarm, they’d have shifted in colour, and the droning sound ringing out from above didn’t match any of the coded tones he knew.

All around them, the Great Mound’s staff seemed equally confused, most pausing in their tasks to look around much as he was. The two Dora Milaje nearest to them moved quickly and professionally, flanking T’Challa and his sister, facing outward alertly. The harsh, constant sound had immediately put him on edge as well, of course, but was also incredibly confusing. What was that? T’Challa blinked and glanced over toward Shuri, but she seemed just as surprised and baffled as he was. He tilted his head questioningly and she shook hers, frowning as she started rapidly gesturing to call up a holographic interface above her hand.

Next to Shuri, Stark had taken a step backwards almost subconsciously, obviously already moving toward his suit at the back of the lab. He looked between T’Challa and Shuri, his forehead creased in concern. “Somebody want to fill us in on what’s happening?”

Dr Banner looked up from the readouts he’d been inspected and was craning his neck toward them. “What’s going on?” he asked as he walked over towards them, raising his voice to be heard over the klaxon.

“I have no idea. That is not a Wakandan alarm,” T’Challa responded tensely. “Shuri, where is that coming from?”

“This doesn’t make any sense,” she said, but she wasn’t paying much attention to him, her frown deepening as she flicked through several holographic screens in rapid succession.

T’Challa paused, focusing on his enhanced senses as he listened carefully—it was clear that the alarm wasn’t coming from the actual alarm speakers built into the facility’s ceilings and… wait, what was that? Something else, below the alarm, being masked by it. Thrusters of some kind?

His train of thought was abruptly derailed as the side of Dr Banner’s neck violent opened in a deep gash, a spray of blood spurting out toward them. A scientist near the Avenger screamed and fell backwards, terrified, as he collapsed. “Bruce!” Tony Stark yelled out, shock and alarm in his voice.

Almost simultaneously, the massive window next to Banner exploded inward in a shower of shattered glass as something leapt through it, landing heavily enough on the white floor that Dr Banner’s body was smashed away, rolling under a table. It was big—bigger than the Hulk had been. The creature’s skin was a sickly, mottled green, stretched taut over bony ridges and bulging muscles that rippled with every step. Its ears were frilled, protruding from the sides of its head like the webbed feet and toes of some kind of lizard, a similarly frilled ridge ran down its spine. It roared at them menacingly, huge hands clenching into fists.

“Blonsky?” T’Challa heard Stark say behind him, his voice incredulous. Ah. Of course. T’Challa had read the reports of this creature—Emil Blonsky, the Abomination. He looked a little different in person than he’d expected. Still… T’Challa couldn’t quite place what it was, but there was something off about this.

“Brother…” Shuri’s voice came to him shakily and he whipped his head around to look at her. She was scrubbing furiously at her eye with one sleeve, expression wide with fear. She looked at him and turned her wrist to show a couple of small spots of blood. At first, he thought she’d been hit by a shard of flying glass, but his veins turned to ice water as he realised it wasn’t her blood. “It got in my eye,” she said, her voice small and slightly unsteady.

T’Challa vaulted over the sand table between him and his sister, grabbing her forearm with one hand and fumbling with the Kimiyo beads at his wrist with the other. Shuri stumbled back a step, a little wobbly on her feet, as he hurriedly pulled up a scan.

At the same time, Stark turned to run toward the back of the room then slowed to a stop, eyes wide. “Uh, where’s my suit?” he called out, an edge of panic in his tone. T’Challa glanced over. The semi-functional Iron Man armour had been standing next to a table toward the back of the lab, but was now conspicuously absent. How had that happened?

Just as the Abomination took a step toward Stark, a blast of orange-blue power streaked from the top of the spiral ramp in the centre of the room, slamming into the creature’s chest and sending him staggering back several paces. Carol Danvers flew down from the floor above, hovering in midair in defiance of gravity, burning energy tracing wispy paths across her red and blue suit as she sized up her opponent.