This is based on the idea of Wanda's powers from October 10th!

October 23rd: The darkest shadows

(Rated K+, Wanda centric)

New York was a big city. It was full of people and cars and minds and cruelty. Yes, the New Avengers Facility wasn't located inside the city, but although it seemed quiet, it wasn't good enough for Wanda to relax. It was the people living there, the team. She had been living there for almost six months now - it had been over six months since her twin had died and it still hurt. She had learned to control her powers a lot better, but she was still sensitive when it came to the feelings and thoughts of others. She couldn't simply stop herself from reading their minds or sensing their inner struggle. She had tried, but it kept her awake all night sometimes.

Some nights it was Sam in the room directly one story lower than hers dreaming about the war, dreaming about his best friend Riley and his other buddies, about bombs and death. Sam hand to experience the time he had been injured during a mission. Riley had noticed it immediately and urged him to fly into the nearby forest where he would be safe for a few hours. He didn't. Blood was covering his whole stomach, but only when the last enemy was down Riley and him landed between the trees. The pain Sam was experiencing was intense during that dream, not comparable to the dream where he had to watch his partner die all over and over again. She knew when he woke up screaming, she knew when he paced around the building restlessly after those nightmares. She never went to check on him. Sometimes she knew Steve heard his friend and they talked for hours.

Rhodes wasn't there most nights, but when he was he most of the time had nice thoughts. He was a distraction for Wanda so she was a little sad he spent his nights in the city with his girlfriend, who was the center of those positive and wonderful feelings Rhodey spread. Wanda loved his presence because when he was around she managed to focus on him and ignore the others a lot better. She loved the intense joy in every cell of the man's body when he thought about her soft lips and wavey hair, her sparkly grey eyes and the little sprinkles on top of her nose. She could almost smell the sweet cherries and delicate roses of her perfume when Rhodey pictued it. Wanda's eyes lit up when he thought about the things they had experienced - their last holiday in Florida.

When Rhodey wasn't around Wanda sometimes focused on Vision, but that didn't work out as well as with Rhodey. Vision's 'mind' was far more complicated than anyone's because the entity they called an Infinity Stone was nothing known on this world. Therefore Visions mind was always dealing with the complexity of scientific problems and other kinds of things Wanda didn't understand and honestly didn't want to understand. It was really hard for her to focus on something so irrelevant for her.

The worst for Wanda however were the two people left in the Facilitly - the two leader of the New Avengers.

Natasha's thoughts and dreams were not the brightest place as well. They circled around the vision Wanda had seen in Natasha's head in South Africa, the place she called the 'Red Room'. Parts of the nightmares painfully reminded Wanda of her own childhood in the orphanage. She could almost feel Natasha's pain when the other woman dreamed about the supervisors beating the little girls up badly, the starvation when they had not obeyed, the cold winters and the many tears shed in lonely nights. Natasha's childhood, however, was clearly worse. There were dreams about punishments so horrible that some girls died, about fights between the little girls where only the stronger ones made it out alive - They were forced to kill each other. To Wanda it was a miracle that Nat was still able to feel - that she was still able to live her life and to joke around. Wanda knew Nat was not just acting - she was really able to feel joy and love and affection.

Wanda didn't know if Nat was the worst of them all or if Steve was. She only knew one thing - Steve was different. She would have thought that his dreams would be just like Sam's, that they would be about the war (although it was a different one). That was not the case, however, only a few were about that. If they were about that time it was about Bucky a lot. The other dreams woke him up a lot and continued to haunt his conscious thoughts as well. At first Wanda hadn't even realized what they were about, she had only known that for him they were more painful and terrifying than anything else. They were a mess of dark colors. There was light blue and white over and over and over until it faded into darker shades into red into black again. A shiver and cold sweat woke Steve from those nightmares after a few minutes everytime. Over the months Wanda realized what he was seeing and it curdled her blood. It was the ice, it were the moments before Steve was forced to sleep for 70 years. It were the long minutes on the brink of death. When Steve was having those dreams he was like a different person to Wanda. He was giving up, he was almost longing for death to come in that freezing hellhole. He was trying to feel nothing, but the pain of the life he wasn't going to live was dragging him down. The loss of everything that was to come when he was only in his mid-twenties was overwhelming and drowned out every inch of joy that he had ever experienced. She now understood why it was so hard for him to be truly happy. Only Nat seemed to be able to make him laugh - on the inside as well.

Wanda sometimes couldn't handle her team. She cared for them and that's what bothered her. She felt helpless. She knew about their pain, but she didn't do a dang thing about it. She didn't know how to address it. It for sure would be wrong to tell them that she knew everything, so she preferred keeping her mouth shut until she found a way... she would find one. She needed to. She stared at her phone sometimes in order to call someone to talk about it, but she didn't want to bother anyone. She had very few friends in Sokovia and very few friends in the city of New York, whome she didn't know well enough yet. She wanted to call Clint before, but she knew he had to mind his own business. So she kept it all to herself - she had to.