It wasn't as if I saw evil looking out of them, or somebody who wasn't Wanda, or anything else occult or uncanny, because I didn't.
When I was in sixth grade, a substitute math teacher accused me of cheating, because I didn't bother to put down all the calculations I used to solve a test on quadratic equations—I just put down the answers. It was more a matter of intuition than calculation. I didn't need to consciously think out every step, because I had a calculator in my head that worked on automatic.
Once I proved to the principal's satisfaction that I was coming up with them honestly—only that my thought processes worked faster than most—I learned that in order to be believed, I had to go back over my intuitions and identify everything that led to my conclusion.
In this case, my conclusion was, 'She's not crazy or possessed, she's sick.' Physically sick. What lead me to that conclusion?
Her eyes were jiggling—the irises quivered and jerked in rapid little movements. I had seen that twice before—a counselor at a day camp, and a girl I went to college with, had the same problem, but while they were perfectly healthy, Wanda wasn't. Her eyes were bulging slightly—again, something that could be normal, many people had prominent eyes, and the sight of me in Victor's armor, with the shoulders up around my ears would probably be enough to make somebody's eyes pop, but Wanda's looked swollen and strained. And in photographs I had seen, she had slightly deep-set eyes—this was not normal for her. But it was such a slight difference.
"Joviana, what are you doing here?" I tore my eyes away from Wanda to look at Doctor Strange, who was there in his floaty, transparent astral form. Physically he was elsewhere—he had sent his spirit forth to visit Wanda.
"Well," I said, improvising hastily, "I have a big problem. You see, I came to ask Wanda if she could undo what she's done to reality, because in this one, I went to Castle Doom, and the Victor who was living there not only didn't know me, he's married to somebody else, and right now, I really need a husband.
"You see, I just found out I'm pregnant, and I can't go to Victor and say, 'I know you don't know me, but not only are we married, but you're the father of this baby I'm going to have.' So since Janet, who I know is a friend of Wanda's, is also a friend of mine, I thought I would come and ask her if she would undo what she did long enough so I could have my wedding, and then maybe we—Wanda and I— could work out what plans she might have for us—Victor and me and our family, before she puts it back again."
"You're going to have a baby?" Wanda focused on that. "Oh, you must be so excited! What are you hoping for, a boy or a girl?"
"I'll be happy if it's healthy, whatever it is—but secretly—I hope it's a girl." I told her. Something else odd about Wanda—she had paused between the words 'hoping' and 'for', shivered slightly, and blinked.
"That's wonderful--." Her blue gaze was unfocused. "I'm sorry I was rude just now, but I get these terrible headaches—migraines, really, I throw up sometimes, they're so bad—and I just can't make them go away. Plus the boys take up so much of my time—Let me show them to you—. Billy? Will? Come meet Mommy's friend."
She wasn't going to find them easily. At my entry, the demonic protoplasms had vanished. "Oh, they're playing hide and seek with me! I'll just be a moment." She got to her feet—which wasn't easy for her—she lost her balance and I had to catch her. "Oh, thank you. I'm so clumsy these days, I don't know why…"
She started hunting around the room, and while she did that, Doctor Strange floated over to me, and hissed, "Joviana, if it's true, I'm sympathetic to your plight, but you're disturbing what I'm attempting to do here. Wanda is a very damaged, fragile individual, who is being held together only by the thread of her bond with her family. She needs to come to terms with what she has done—not be encouraged in it."
"What are you two talking about?" asked Wanda, who was looking under the bed, which had a pink floral dust ruffle, covered by a layer of lace, ornamented with swags of pearls and ribbon rosebuds. I would have loved it—when I was eight.
"Your headaches." I told her. "We're trying to work out how to make them go away for you."
"Oh! If you could, I would really appreciate it." She began to hum, 'I'm your only friend, I'm not your only friend…' while she hunted for her 'sons'. My signal-blocker was working. She did have Professor Xavier on her string somewhere, and he was passing on to her what he picked up from my head.
"Yes, I know. Stephen, I know there's all sorts of magical and mental and cosmic and metaphysical things at work here, but have you ruled out that something physical might be at the root of this? You were her teacher—did she always have nystagmus?" That was the medical term for the rapid involuntary eye movements I had observed in her.
"Nystagmus?" He sounded surprised. "No…"
"And her eyes seemed like they were bulging, to me. I'm pretty sure she had something like a seizure while I was talking to her. This tremor came over her, and she looked disoriented."
"I had ascribed that to her mental illness." he said. "She is a very sick woman. She told me she has been spending all her time up here—that the Wanda seen in public is a construct she made to take her place."
"Maybe because she doesn't want her family to see her physical deterioration. She doesn't want them to know that something is wrong."
"She has hardly deteriorated! Her madness is…"
"Did you see the trouble she's having getting around, even now? She's lost her physical equilibrium. And those headaches. Leaving all the business of her powers and the Nexus Being out of it, if she had come to you—or if her family brought her to you, back when you were practicing medicine, and reported that she was having those physical symptoms, along with major behavioral and cognitive changes, what would you start testing her for?"
Stephen Strange looked at Wanda, whose wide blue eyes were having difficulty focusing.
"A brain tumor…" he said, slowly.
Forty-five minutes later, I was assisting as Victor trepanned her skull. Doctor Strange was telling him exactly what he was seeing, with the help of his mystic amulet, the Eye of Agamotto, while Victor peeled back a flap of her scalp (which I had shaved and disinfected) and began to drill a hole in her braincase.
Trepanning was the oldest medical procedure known to man—there were prehistoric records of it, in the form of skulls which had very neat holes drilled in them—and some of the operations had been total successes, because the bone had started growing back. Cutting a hole in somebody's head to let out the demons went way, way, back…
Assisting was too strong a word. I had very little medical training beyond first aid, but I could slosh disinfectant around, mop up blood and find Victor a sterile vial to collect a sample of her cerebrospinal fluid. I just did what I was told.
After I had got the Sorcerer Supreme to think like a doctor again, and not like a superhero, he had taken advantage of his astral form to look inside her head. He diagnosed pilocytic astrocytomas, in the form of an optic nerve glioma, with concomitant gliomas in the thalamus and sellar regions. She had not one but several small tumors, which pressed on her brain and were causing many, if not all, of her difficulties—from her nystagmus to her behavioral changes.
Complicating this was psuedotumor cerebri—an abnormal build-up of cerebrospinal fluid that was putting even more pressure on her brain. That was what Victor was trying to alleviate now. The smell of bone burning as he worked was reminiscent of both meat cooking, and of having a tooth drilled at the dentist's office. Once the hole went all the way through, Victor took a syringe and used it to carefully extract several ccs of fluid.
"It's easing." Doctor Strange said. "Yes. That's good. Beautifully done, Victor."
"I never do anything less." Victor replied. "That should reduce her misery for long enough to get her to better facilities, but one makes do with what one has on hand."
The whole procedure had been performed in Magneto's dining room, on the dining room table itself, as the kitchen had no suitable work surfaces. It was as sterile and clean as we could make it, and we had put down plastic sheeting and newspapers. Doctor Strange had judged her condition so serious as to require immediate surgery—and that Victor should carry it out. He did not trust his hands to do it.
Victor was stitching her scalp back together when the first indication that the world was returning to normal arrived in the form of Quicksilver, who burst into the dining room at high speed and shouted, "What have you done to my sister?"
"I have only saved her life." Victor replied, haughtily. "Or at least helped to prolong it."
"He tells the truth." Doctor Strange told Pietro. "Your sister was in grave danger of permanent brain damage."
"What?" asked Pietro. I remembered that Wanda had been considered the bright one. Hopefully she would be again.
"Your sister has a brain tumor." I said. "She's probably had it for years—perhaps ever since Chthon possessed her. That was when she began acting out of character, wasn't it?"
"Yes—." Quicksilver replied. "Who are you?—Oh, right. Lady Doom. Father told me about you."
"How is your father—and where is he?" I asked.
"Joviana, we don't need you in here any longer." Doctor Strange said. "Why don't you and Pietro have a talk? I know you can fill him in on matters as they stand."
Wanda had agreed to be anesthetized, after some persuading on my part. Among the things she had divulged to me was the fact that her brother had come up with the idea of changing the world into a place where everybody had what they always wanted.
"Let's talk in the kitchen." I suggested. "I know I'm dying for a cup of coffee."
"What do you mean, on matters as they stand?" Pietro asked. "Will Wanda be all right?"
I gently nudged him out the door. "I hope so. She's got a lot of hard road ahead of her. Doctor Strange says the tumors are benign, but that only means they're not destructive to other cells. It doesn't mean they're not life-threatening. There's only so much room in her head…" I got him down the hall and into the kitchen.