The thing, whatever it is, appears while her back is turned.
It speaks a language she doesn't understand, not out loud - she can translate it better than anyone else in the world, written down, but it's been dead for a thousand years. It shouldn't be spoken out loud.
It glows red, and gold, over a rich, heavy brown.
Wanda doesn't even scream. There isn't time for that, between turning around and the world disappearing.
Pietro finds her.
He's on the run again, and thinks that they would be better off to keep running.
Wanda saw what that did to their father, saw what it has done to what few friends they've had over the years. Best not. Best opt for safety, and hide.
Except-
The thing doesn't want to hide. It slips out from behind her eyes and uses her mouth to speak to Pietro.
They're found in the heartbeat between scarlet and normality, and Pietro is too shaken to even fight.
Belle Reve is a strange sort of name for a prison, but a fitting one, for Wanda.
She dreams on a glorious scale, tinted always in blood and imperial gold, and wakes when her shock collar buzzes to life. Her cage is spacious, but still a cage, and the thing - the Witch, it calls itself - is strong enough to bend the bars, to squeeze fingerprints into cold steel.
Her shock collar is replaced within a fortnight, with something stronger.
A week later, they begin sedating her.
Pietro, she hears, fights and battles. She wants to shout, to tell him don't, let them trust you, make them let you help me!
He keeps fighting. With the new shock collar in place, the Witch cannot emerge. With the sedatives in place, neither can Wanda.
She's buzzed almost to sedation when the Fury comes a-calling, bright pated in the gloom of her singed, shadowed cell.
"I hear you've been speaking in tongues," he says, hands clasped before him, the hem of his great leather coat whispering across the polished, ash-powdered concrete floor.
"So they tell me," Wanda says, and it's almost a joke. "I'm never privy to those conversations."
"So they tell me," the Fury says, and smiles.
Wanda catches an echo of her own appearance, in the trails left by his many-layered mind, and would be shocked, if she could still be.
I look mad, she thinks, and laughs. Perhaps I am.
"There are several of them," Pietro whispers, audible only because Wanda has not been sedated today and can reach out her mind to his. The words are too fast, too low, for anyone else to even realise that they are words at all. "Criminals, bound to serve."
And what are we? she returns, much to his annoyance. Pietro might sometimes regard himself as a criminal, but she he always views as an innocent. It would bother her more if it were not so typical of him.
The yard is painfully bright after so many long weeks of her cell, and Wanda squints against the sun. Something simmers and stirs under her skin, and she smiles.
"I think," she says, "that the Witch doesn't like the sunlight."
The several others in orange jumpsuits step back, and Wanda smiles.
"I'm sorry," she says, and the tall, official-looking man with the fair hair shakes his head. He has a kind face, sad eyes, and a worried soul - Wanda can feel it, with the gifts that are hers, not touched by the Witch. Everyone here is worried, and angry, and sad. Even the people in the orange jumpsuits. Maybe especially the people in the orange jumpsuits.
"That's what she calls herself," Wanda offers, when one of the grunts steps toward her with a scowling face and growling mind.
The fair one's companion, dark-haired, false-armed, shifts his hold on his gun, and Wanda's smile falters. The sun catches on the gun, the arm, his pale eyes, and Wanda feels Pietro strain closer against his chains, reacting to a threat unseen but no less realised for it.
It's a good thing if the Witch doesn't like sunlight, Wanda thinks. No one seems to understand just how dangerous the Witch is - the Fury thinks he can wield her shadows against the dark, and the Baron, when he haunts her dreams, thinks to use her as a weapon against his enemies.
It is a good thing that the Witch is afraid of sunlight. In this shining, reflecting, mirrored place, outside Wanda's fathomless cell, she has no power. It means they only have to worry about her when the sun goes down.
Their first mission is an extraction. Dead or alive. Ten years off all their sentences.
Except, probably, Wanda's. She's far too dangerous to be allowed walk free.
They extract alive. The Witch makes sure of it. She doesn't seem to think that Wanda has any barriers to freedom save the length of her sentence.
Wanda has more barriers than anyone, she thinks.
There is Steve, the Captain, who is locked into this programme for reasons they do not understand - he has an exemplary service record, he is a hero to the Marines who accompanied them on their mission as a safeguard for the government types who did not want to release them at all, he is a good man in the best possible sense. It does not make sense that he would bind himself here, in the wreckage that follows war.
His companion - the jumpsuiters call him the Soldier initially, because they don't know his name at first, and he ripped the name tags off his uniform. He watches, and wallows, and flinches at shattering cups in the canteen but is unmoved by explosions in the field. His terror in peacetime reminds Wanda of her own horror in those stretches between the Witch's visits, and she thinks that were she not a jumpsuiter, they might be friends.
She is a jumpsuiter, though. Most of them are.
Natalya is a danger, the deadliest woman in the world, a murderer a thousand times over with hands as gentle as Mamă's were, so very long ago.
Natalya is Russian, Soviet Russian, and Wanda thinks that she more than anyone understands how easy it was for Wanda and Pietro to fall between the pages of carefully-recorded America. Russia is not the Russia she knew, and Sokovia is now Latveria, and the whole world turns and some are left behind in too-fast revolutions.
Natalya is Russian, Wanda and Pietro Russian-Yugoslavian-Sokovian-Latverian. They know revolutions in ways these proud Americans never can.
Steve, the Soldier, Natalya the Widow. Wanda likes them best. The others…
Stark tinkers, tap-tap- bang, and almost ended the world when one of his adored artificial intelligence programmes went rogue. Wanda knows that programme, saw what it did to Sokovia (now Latveria, a kingdom under a king unanticipated), and hates Stark for that, as well as for his towering arrogance and infinite righteousness.
The Doctor has problems similar to Wanda's own, and she fears what his Hulk might do if brought under the sway of the Witch, so she avoids him as much as she can. It is safer, for them both and for everyone else.
The idea of what he might do under her sway haunts her dreams more even than the Baron, whose influence seems to lessen as the Witch's grows.
The sniper, with his hawk's eyes, does not fit as a jumpsuiter. Wanda has peeked, and there are no great terrors in his past, no shames he seeks to atone for.
She looks a little harder, hears the echo of children laughing, and awards for exemplary service, and realises ah, a double agent. He does not fit as a jumpsuiter because he is not a jumpsuiter - just a man doing an unpleasant job.
Their second mission-
Wanda is not part of their second mission.
Wanda is their second mission.
They train together in the yard three times a week - a buzzer set to a specific frequency limits Pietro's speed, a series of sedative injections keeps the Doctor's Hulk under wraps, shock-shackles on Stark and shock-collar on Wanda.
There are walls, but as Natalya says, walls fall. She watched the one in Berlin do just that, after all.
Wanda doesn't know what keeps Natalya in the yard, but there must be something. Natalya is not a woman to be constrained by concrete and barbed wire.
Today they are practising their hand-to-hand combat, Wanda with the Soldier because her magic has no effect on his false arm. The Soldier is fierce, merciless, but when he does hurt her - beyond bruising, that is - his hands are gentle, flesh and false alike.
Wanda likes him. She thinks that he is kind, if only he would allow it of himself.
Pietro is with the Doctor, which she knows frustrates him - for all his speed, he cannot seem to counter the slow determination in the Doctor's careful movements, shapes and forms Wanda can see him drawing from deep memory before he makes them.
Pietro once fought the Hulk, too, and speed was no match for animal strength then. Wanda does not know any force on Earth that might equal the Hulk.
So they practice their hand-to-hand combat, Wanda with the Soldier and Natalya sitting aside, offering correction and encouragement as needed, for the time when Wanda's gifts (her magic, but they don't believe in magic in Belle Reve even though they live in fear of a Witch) fail her. Natalya speaks mostly in Russian, their most fluent shared language, mother tongue to one and second to the other, and Wanda is constantly surprised when the Soldier, who is American, as American as the Captain, clips back in low-pitched gutter Russian, accented of Moscow and full of swear words.
His hands move faster than anyone's but Pietro's, and perhaps Natalya's - Wanda cannot say for sure, since she has never sparred with Natalya, not yet - and he is strong in a way that frightens Pietro. Wanda finds it thrilling, though, that he treats her as if she is no more dangerous than any of the soldiers with whom he and the Captain train.
Wanda's cell has no windows, but her powers can find many eyes. She has watched the training, has seen how far above the rest the Soldier and the Captain stand, has watched through the Fury's eyes as the men who carry the guns are defeated, one after another, by first the Soldier, who is so powerful and so ferocious, and then by the Captain, who is fast and agile and deadly.
Her training is not deadly - that is saved for Pietro, who they think is more likely to need it. Wanda's is defensive, because she has no need to attack. She has the Witch for that.
Wanda learns new swear words every day, from the Soldier's gutter-Russian and Natalya's polished accent. The hawk-eyed Sniper shares them too, in what she thinks is Bosnian Romani, but it might be Serbian - it is so hard to tell.
Stark, when he lowers himself to speak with them, has words in Yiddish and in Spanish and, when he forgets that he has company, in Hebrew, but they are not so often swear words as Wanda might have expected.
The Doctor has a dozen languages, but only English is his own - he never swears, even in his mind. He stops himself every time.
The Captain swears more than anyone, but only Wanda knows that. He never swears aloud.
Her new swear words come in useful when the Witch begins to claw at the divide between their minds in the small hours, red-dripping fingers lighting sickly gold against the gentle dark of Wanda's own mind. The Witch cannot come in if Wanda bars her way, and ignoring her as hard as possible is the best way to bar her.
So Wanda swears in Sokovian and Latverian and Russian and Bosnian-Romani and Yiddish and Hebrew and Spanish and English, and she finds swear words in the minds of the other inmates, inmates she doesn't know - she doesn't know their languages, but she can pick out the bits she wants, and slides from English into Urdu and then into Afrikaans as if it is nothing at all.
The Witch fades a little, when she does that.
The Witch does not fade, the day before the jumpsuiters are sent out on their second mission.
The Fury brings Wanda to meet an army of men, or men of an army. She is small and inoffensive, an object of pity as neither Natalya nor the men can be. The Fury needs a jumpsuiter with him when he presents his case, and Wanda is the safest option.
Until she isn't.
His plan involves sharing the schematics for a series of super-powered airships, designed by Stark, and the Witch stirs at the mention.
An opening, she thinks, and then Wanda knows no more.
Fury storms into the yard.
Natalya frowns.
Fury storms into the yard alone.
"Suit up," he says, boiling over without so much as a sarcastic comment from Clint. "You've got to close the gates to Hell."
"New York is going to develop a complex," Clint murmurs, bare-armed but for his wristguard. He's smiling, a twisted thing that makes Nat's heart twist in kind - he has grown protective of the twins, who are so young and so unfairly done by. "It just keeps getting slapped."
The red-gold-hell coloured vortex above the city spins with the sluggish energy of a cat after the canary, and Wanda is down below somewhere.
"Good thing we filthy immigrants are here to save the day once more, eh?" she says, and Pietro, sickly-pale across the bay, smiles very slightly at that. It dies in a heartbeat, but it is the first smile to cross his face since Fury roused them to duty, and Nat is grateful for it.
Steve and Barnes stand in the open bay door, talking over the roar of the engines and stream, and Nat rolls her eyes in their direction. Clint is their colleague, and she may as well be, but still they plot away from the crowd.
Tony watches so closely that she can't really blame the soldier boys, but even so, it seems a little much.
The city is alive with…
Nat doesn't know what to call them.
Some glow blue, an ugly, aching colour, but for the most part, they shine sickly red, the same red that taints the bright brown and maroon of Wanda's own magics.
"The Witch has become very powerful," Clint says, quiet and Kosovan, and Bruce frowns in their direction - Bruce knows so many languages that Clint sometimes switches mid-sentence, which leaves things interesting grammatically, but it's better that way. Better no one knows that Clint isn't really a jumpsuiter.
Wanda knows, or at least Nat thinks she does. Wanda knows far more than Nat would like.
Who lives? Nat doesn't know, beyond the jumpsuiters, Steve, and Barnes.
They all get through. They all reach the station where the Witch, in her swirling robes of scarlet, in her crown of gold and blood, has made her stand.
There, beside her, is the creature Wanda calls the Baron. It looks like a man, and sounds like a man, but glows blue like the demons in the streets.
Natalya remembers another great room that glowed scarlet. She looks at the Witch, looks at Barnes, and thinks, we will topple these walls too, Yasha.
The world goes very, very still, when James Buchanan Barnes rests his rifle against his shoulder and looses the bullet Nicholas J. Fury entrusted to him and him alone.
Pietro screams, as the bullet rips through the cavernous space, and the Hulk howls his victory as the blue Baron fades into a normal man, no longer a demon.
The Witch laughs, until the bullet, carved and cured until it is deadly even to her, catches in her breastbone.
The red fades from her eyes, and Wanda smiles to Natalya.
"Thank you," she says, and the vortex collapses. So does she.