Chapter 12: Inoculated
After great pain, a formal feeling comes—
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet, mechanical, go round—
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought—
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone—
This is the Hour of Lead—
Remembered, if outlived
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—
First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—
~Emily Dickinson
They sat in a quiet booth in a pizzeria in Copenhagen.
After the fight on the mountainside, they had portaled to a hospital in Buenos Aires, where Strange had again donned doctor clothes and admitted the young woman, Rayen. While he was making sure she was getting the treatment she needed, Wanda waited with Wong, who was mostly silent, staring at his hands and thinking over the attack. When Strange returned, he announced Rayen would live, and decided they all needed pizza.
"Okay you were right; this is the best pizza I've ever had," Wanda said after taking a bite of roasted garlic and sautéed mushrooms drizzled in a balsamic reduction on crust so good she would have eaten it plain.
"A colleague introduced me to this place when I was presenting a case study at a conference here," Strange said. "Before this, I didn't think I even liked pizza. I don't eat here often. I save it for special occasions. I think winning a fight with extra-dimensional mind-eaters qualifies."
"Mmhm," Wanda agreed. After a few more bites, she said, "Doctor Strange, Sam told me you used to be a surgeon."
"Yes."
"So how did you become, you know, a sorcerer?"
"I crashed my car."
She frowned in confusion.
He explained. "After the injuries I sustained, I couldn't perform surgery anymore, my hands shook too much. I tried everything to fix them, every treatment I'd ever heard of, and eventually...found my way to the Sanctum, to the Ancient One, who said she could teach me to use magic to control my body, and the world beyond."
Wanda glanced at Wong, who nodded subtly, indicating this Ancient One was the previous Sorcerer Supreme he'd told her about.
"I see. So...is magic something anyone could learn, or..."
Strange raised his eyebrows. "Tell me, Miss Maximoff, what exactly is it that you think you do?"
"My powers, you mean?"
"Yes."
She looked at her hands, but didn't bring out her powers in this public a place. While they were safely out of earshot from the pizzeria's other patrons, the room was dim enough that red light suddenly flickering from a woman's hands would certainly attract attention. "I don't know, exactly. I've never understood it. HYDRA exposed me to Loki's Staff, the same way they used it to make weapons, and it changed me. There are worlds where I have powers but there was no HYDRA, so I must have gotten powers different ways there, so the Mind Stone must have just brought out something I always had the potential to become, which explains why Pietro's powers were different. But I don't know how it works, whether it's magic or just something from the Mind Stone that science can't explain yet."
"Abilities that science can't explain yet," Strange said. "You might as well call it magic. There are many different kinds of magic. Ours is one kind, yours is another kind, and you need to understand each one individually. To answer your question, not everyone has the intelligence or the temperament to learn to control the magic we use, but the energy is there to be harnessed by anyone who learns how."
Wanda looked down at her pizza, biting her lip. She wanted to ask if they could teach her to use portals, but she didn't want to sound needy, or ungrateful for what they'd already done for her, or foolish in case it was something beyond her intelligence. After all, she didn't even have a high school education; if she couldn't even understand the power she had inside her, how was she supposed to learn something as advanced as the magic Strange and Wong had been studying for years?
Wong saw the self-doubt on her face. "Wanda, you were able to see through the illusions of the mind lice, to resist their madness. That's more than Strange or I could do."
"I think...I think it's just that...everything I've been through makes it harder for them to make me go mad. I mean, I was trapped in a collapsing building staring at a bomb for two days when I was ten, I grew up at the mercy of the streets of Sokovia, the HYDRA experiments did things to my body and mind I can't even describe, I felt my brother die, I was kept in a straitjacket in solitary confinement for weeks, I've watched myself in other worlds do unthinkable things, commit unspeakable atrocities. And..." Her voice dropped to a hoarse whisper as she put the worst into words. "I was forced to kill the man I loved. I feel like I've gone crazy a dozen times already. I don't think there is anything the mind lice could think to do to me that would be worse than all that. Maybe that's what made some people immune to it in the other Earth; maybe they were the people who already suffered too much. You can't break what's already broken."
"Well, you could always take something that's already broken and break it even more," Strange said. "But I can see how suffering so much would give you a much higher threshold of insanity. An inoculation. But this brings up an interesting possibility."
"What?" Wong asked him.
He pointed at Wanda. "I thought your greatest use would be finding the source of the mind lice, but now I'm thinking once we do find it, you're going to be our best chance to destroy it."
"Me? I can't," she said in sudden panic. She wasn't afraid to die, but the idea of having the fate of the world resting on her was too much. "I sensed their source when they were in my head. It's...too big. Too powerful."
Strange actually rolled his eyes. "I took on Thanos alongside Tony Stark, Spider Man, and the Guardians of the Galaxy, and he beat us single-handedly. You took him on by yourself and he had to call in reinforcements to keep you from destroying him. You're strong enough."
"I could never do that again, against anyone else."
"Why not?" Wong asked.
She glanced at him. "My power has always... It's a function of my mind, my will. The stronger my emotions are, the stronger my powers are. My negative emotions have always been strong. Maybe I'm just a hateful person. I mean, I let HYDRA experiment on me so I could get revenge on the person I blamed for killing my parents. I watched Thanos murder the love of my life, and from my perspective, I faced him again just a few minutes after that happened. I've never felt anything as strong as the hate I felt for him in that moment. I'll never feel anything that strong again."
Rather than being horrified at this confession as Wanda feared they'd be, Wong's expression was full of sorrow and sympathy. Strange's only response was to mutter, "Interesting."
The table fell silent. Wanda took another slice of pizza and poured herself a little more beer from their pitcher.
"How many other Earths do you think you've seen?" Strange asked.
"I don't know. A few thousand. Why?"
"In my time as a sorcerer, I've seen dimensions completely unlike our own. The Mirror Universe, the Dark Dimension, the Negative Zone. All of those aren't alternate dimensions so much as interstitial realities governed by completely different laws of physics, unrecognizable as reality to a casual observer. I spent decades in a time loop in the Dark Dimension, dying over and over again, to protect the world from Dormammu. Some idiot who obviously hadn't studied psychology said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results, but that's exactly how I saved the world the first time. I programmed the timeloop so I couldn't break it, no matter how much I wanted to. Only Dormammu could break it by not killing me, which he eventually did. But as much as I've seen, what you've witnessed in the course of spying on alternate timelines must be on another level. You've alluded to the horrors you've seen yourself committing, but I'm sure it must be even harder to see people you love and trust on the side of evil. Your brother, I'm sure. The other Avengers. You said you've destroyed or damaged the world five times; how many times has Vision caused the end of the world?"
Wanda stared at her half-eaten slice of pizza.
"Strange, I hardly think this is an appropriate line of questioning," Wong chided him.
"Twice," Wanda stated. "Twice that I've seen. And yes, that is a terrible thing to know about someone you love."
"Of course, those aren't really Vision," Wong said. "Not the one you knew."
"Yes and no," she said. "We're shaped by different circumstances in different timelines, but there's a thread...a thread of mind or soul, a self...that runs through every universe. You might be born at a different time, maybe even to different parents, with different features or even a different sex, but there's this...youness that runs through all of them. And what happens to you in one universe kind of tugs on the others. Are you ever in a bad mood and you don't know why? Something bad probably just happened to another version of you. I've seen things that happen to one version of me show up in the dreams of other versions the next night. When you get a sudden pain for no apparent reason, another version of you just got a serious injury. It's crazy, but you're connected to them. They are you, and if you were in exactly the same situations they're in, you would do exactly what they do."
"Is that thread how you find yourself and Vision in other dimensions?" Wong asked.
She nodded.
"And you put yourself through that by choice," Strange mused. "You suffer all that knowledge just so you can get a few brief glimpses of yourself happy."
She shrugged. "Since losing Vision, it's the only thing that makes me feel...anything." She paused. It occured to her that wasn't true anymore. She was beginning to want things again. She wanted to protect the world from the doom creeping over it. And she wanted to learn more about magic. The suffering she'd endured still suffused her, saturating every fiber of her being, but she sensed the reverberations beginning to fade. She would never be the same after what she'd gone through, but if she let herself, she might heal.
"Wanda?" Wong asked, bringing her out of her reverie.
"I'm sorry." She looked at both of them. "The source of the mind lice...I don't know if I can destroy it, but I'll try. I'll do whatever I can."
"Good," Strange said.
Immediately after returning to New York, Wanda went to bed, even though it was only just after 7:00 p.m. local time.
A few minutes later, Wong found Doctor Strange out on the roof, staring at the lights of the city.
"I've figured out what your problem with Wanda is," Wong said.
"I don't have a problem with Wanda."
"You're a genius with multiple degrees, you learned the mystic arts faster than any other sorcerer in our records, and she's an orphan with no education, years younger than you, who may be more powerful than you'll ever be without putting forth the effort you have. You're jealous of her."
Strange tilted his head, considering. "You may have a point."
"I know what you're probably thinking: training her may make her far more dangerous. But leaving her untrained, unaware of the extent of her powers, could be the greater risk."
"True. It's a gamble either way, but training her means being able to keep an eye on her. Of course, it's a moot point if we don't save the world from the mind lice, or if she doesn't survive it. That's what I was just thinking about. Kind of."
"'Kind of'?"
"Wong, I know you think I can be arrogant..."
"True."
"And reckless."
"Sometimes."
"And callous."
"Yes."
"And an egomaniac who likes to play God."
"You are."
"Anyway, I've got an idea. A plan. And before you say it's too risky, or too cruel, hear me out, because we might need something exactly this drastic to defeat the source..."