"She's never done anything like that before."

"And what are we going to do about it?"

"What else, Romanoff? We ground her, we anchor her to this reality, and we hold her tight enough so she doesn't break."

Steve, Natasha and Sam were holding council in the briefing room, the door tightly shut and all recording instruments disabled. This was a sensitive issue.

"I thought simple therapy was gonna take care of it," Sam said, rubbing his face.

"This is Wanda Maximoff. Nothing's simple," Natasha stated. "I want to help this girl same as you guys, but there's only so much we can do."

Sam let out a humorless, slightly panicked laugh. "Uh, no shit. Nobody freak out, but I think she can do actual magic."

Natasha shook her head. "There's no such thing as magic."

"Up till a couple years ago," Steve said, "I would have said there were no such things as aliens either."

"She made the room distort like it was some kind of painting, like at any moment she could change reality itself," Sam pointed out. He spread his hands. "I saw it, man! She made everything seem so, I dunno, fragile. Temporary, even. Now, how the hell do we deal with something like that?"

"So that's a part of her power set, to change reality?" said Steve incredulously.

"Maybe that is her power," said Sam. "I freaked out. Look, you said Wanda got her powers from Loki's scepter. Which is in itself an object from another dimension. What if her power is somehow...transdimensional?"

Steve tried not to look amused. "I expect this kind of talk from Banner or Selvig, but you?"

"Boys, focus," Natasha said. "We need to deal with the here and now. This time. This reality." She spread her hands. "Now, I have a solution, but you're not gonna like it Steve."

"Try me."

She looked at him with that mischievous-little-sister glint in her eye, "It entails bringing in outside help."

"At this point, we're running out of options," Steve stated. "Wanda's our responsibility now, so if there's any chance we have of helping her, I want to hear it."

Natasha's gaze flicked from him to Sam, who shrugged as if to say you heard the man. She folded her hands.

"So, there's this guy on the Hydra Insight list..."

Wanda lay curled up in bed, trying to shut the world out.

She felt drained and weak from that last power surge, that out-of-control burst of energy which had scared Sam so much. Wanda hated it. She hated people being scared of her. She hated being out of control and being so scared of herself. That did not happen to normal people.

She concluded that the world is full of monsters, and either one was consumed or destroyed by them or they became one themselves.

Wanda was very sure that by now, Sam was already telling the others what she'd done. They were probably discussing what was to be done with her, and the thought was terrifying, as so many things had become to Wanda since she'd gotten her powers. Were they going to send her away? Kill her? Find some new, awful, painful way to take away her abilities?

She shut her eyes and thought of Pietro, letting herself miss him and mourn for him. It was the only thing she could do, the only thing that remotely helped- but as she was quickly realizing, it was also the reason she was losing control.

The trembling was starting again deep inside of her, and helplessly she watched her hands shake. The power was there, deep inside of her, trying to burst its way out in catastrophe and destruction and Wanda didn't know what to do- or even for how long she could hold it back. She pushed herself out of bed, reeling, knowing she needed to make her way to the other Avengers for help.

The room started to rattle once she got on her feet. Her sparse furniture shook, the doors trembled on their hinges, and the lights were going haywire again- Wanda tried to hold on, the panic building inside of her. Not again. Not this again, she thought. If she did what she had done that morning, and it got worse, she'd never hear the end of it, they'd kill her for sure, or she would kill them-

Wanda, focus! But there was nothing to focus on. She needed him, she realized, her brother, her twin, her other half, the stabilizing agent to her out-of-control abilities, and at that moment she so desperately wanted him with every shred of power she had...

The magic started to swell inside her, manifesting in smoky red swirls outside. Wanda was never sure if it was indeed magic, or something else, but it was a part of her yet something she could not control. Horrified, she watched the room go red again, the air shifting and bulging and swirling as if her world was dissolving into diaphanous gauze and silk-

What was she hearing? Were those voices? Were there people out there?

"Stop it," Wanda said aloud, to herself, to no one in particular. "Stop it. Stop...I can't- I'm scared!"

Screaming for her brother would be pointless. She did it anyway.

And in that moment, reality was ripped apart.

Wanda's senses went awry, yet another thing she couldn't control. But something, a warm familiar feeling, started to curl around her chest, pulling and tugging her, drawing her like a magnet, and she knew in a split second that she had to be there. That whatever it was felt right...

She didn't need to move. All she did was lean forward, and that was it.

She fell through the gap in reality.

Like Alice through the rabbit hole.