Chapter 6: Empty Room
Since you went away
No flowers are left on earth.
~Soseki, from The Moon in the Pines: Zen Haiku, trans. Jonathan Clemens
Wanda didn't know how this building worked. It seemed to be larger inside than outside, and she was pretty sure the door Wong opened to show her to her room hadn't been there earlier.
The room was larger than a normal bedroom, but it was sparsely furnished. It had a bare bookshelf, an empty set of drawers, a wood desk with a matching wood chair, and a bed.
She sat on the bed and stared at the wall.
Doctor Strange had declined her offer to help with the research, claiming he'd be mostly skimming medical reports she couldn't possibly understand. Wong suggested she get some rest. But she didn't know how she could rest with doom hanging over the planet.
Not that it was the first time she'd felt doom. That had been when she'd seen Ultron's plan in Vision's mind.
No, it had been while trapped with Pietro in their bombed apartment, their parents dead and their own survival unlikely.
But she'd had Pietro then. And she had Vision when they learned about Thanos. It wasn't until the very end, when she accepted Vision's insistence that they were out of time and she had to destroy him to stop Thanos, that that one had really started to feel like doom. And that feeling had never gone away, not when she'd woken up in Wakanda after being dusted to be told by a strangely dressed man she'd never seen before that she had to go with him if she wanted to stop Thanos, not when Thanos and his forces were killed by Tony Stark, and not for even a single moment since.
Come to think of it, doom was a feeling she knew particularly well.
Maybe Strange had been right; maybe if she were being honest with herself, she didn't give a damn about this world anymore.
She pushed herself off the bed and restlessly drifted around the empty room, opening and shutting the closet door, the empty drawers. She opened another door, finding a small bathroom, and looked at herself in the mirror. She didn't feel like the face in the mirror was really hers.
When Wong had opened the door, he'd said, "This is your room." Wanda hadn't replied, but something about it had sounded wrong to her, like it was ungrammatical to call anything hers. She'd lost everything. Not just Vision and Natasha and Tony. Her old room and most of her belongings had been destroyed along with the Avengers compound, what few possessions she had to her name during her time on the run had been lost in the five years she hadn't existed.
When she decided to disappear in the weeks after defeating Thanos, she hadn't taken anything with her. Honestly, she hadn't thought about how long she'd be gone. She'd bounced between staying with Pepper Potts, Clint, and Sam for a couple of weeks, but nowhere had felt like she belonged. She thought she was just going on a trip to figure things out. Maybe that's just what she'd told herself. Whatever it was she was looking for, she never found it.
She'd left with the clothes on her back. Soon, returning to skills developed as a teenager on the streets of Sokovia, she was stealing new ones. And even the clothes she wore never felt like they belonged to her.
She had one thing that she cared about. It had been in the pocket of the coat she'd been wearing when Strange and Wong kidnapped her, and when Wong transmuted her outfit, she'd still felt it in the pocket of the sweater. She took it out now and put it in the desk drawer, then sat down in the chair and stared at her hands.
It would be so easy. So easy to let herself forget about this doomed, dismal world for a little while...
Her fingers began twitching on their own, and soon they raised a red glow that surrounded her, blotting away the room she was in. Comfort came over her like a blanket.
What world should she start with?