Look What You Made Me Do (Wanda-SI/OC)

Natasha laughed—a genuine, full-bodied chuckle—as Bucky and Steve lay sprawled out across the sparring mats that lined the floor, groaning.

They were in the Tower’s main training area: an entire, two-storey floor set up as a fully-equipped gym that would put even the most exclusive membership clubs to shame. Half the floor was dedicated to various sets of exercise equipment, including a small rock-climbing wall and a full set of physio equipment to monitor and track performance over time. The corner they were currently in was a small arena that had been set up for hand-to-hand combat practice, with padded blue mats lining the floor to soften falls and an array of practice weapons and other training tools on a long rack against one wall.

“What?” said Pietro cheerfully, jogging lightly in a circle around the two super soldiers, clearly enjoying himself. “You didn’t see that coming? I thought maybe after the first five times…”

Steve took a deep breath, centring himself for a moment before rolling back to his feet with a single, fluid motion. His eyes flicked over to Natasha, sitting perched on a folding chair set up on the sidelines. “I don’t suppose you want to tap in, Romanov?” he called over to her.

“Oh, no. I am absolutely fine where I am, thanks,” she responded with an exaggeratedly sweet smile before nodding back toward Pietro. “You may want to pay attention.”

“Oh, I am. Believe me,” Steve said, grinning as he turned back toward the younger man and settled into a loose, two-fisted combat stance. “I could do this all day.” Bucky clambered to his feet next to him, the two of them facing off once again against the lone Maximoff.

Almost two full hours of sparring flew by pretty quickly and, by the end of it, even Pietro was breathing hard and drenched in sweat. He was fast and could hit extremely hard if he got some speed up, but his technique was unmistakeably sloppy. HYDRA’s training had obviously disregarded proper, disciplined hand-to-hand combat training in favour of pushing him to maximise his speed advantage. While that might have worked for them, given that what they really wanted out of him was a weapon to help take down the Avengers, it meant he made a lot of mistakes that the highly-trained super soldiers might have been able to exploit… if they could ever lay an actual hand on him.

However, Steve had pointed out that while he could definitely lean on his speed advantage to win most fights, if he ever came up against another ‘speedster’—as Wanda had labelled Pietro—he’d almost certainly struggle unless he learned to actually fight properly. Pietro was surprisingly receptive to Steve’s lessons, though it probably helped that, if he got bored at any point, he could just take things up a notch and strut about smugly after beating his sparring partners into the ground.

Once they finished up and had hit the showers, Natasha stepped up alongside Pietro as the four of them made their way back upstairs, heading for the kitchen. “So, how was your first real Avengers training session?” she asked.

Pietro snorted. “Eh, you know, just had to pace myself so the old men could keep up.” He nodded at her, the corner of his mouth tugging upward. “Yeah… it was fun. Thank you.”

Nat shot him a lopsided smile. “I had a feeling you needed to let off some steam.”

“I guess…” he shrugged, his expression faltering slightly.

“How’s Wanda doing?” she asked, casually.

Pietro side-eyed her. “You’d know better than I would.”

She just shook her head, looking back at him. “Not really. You’re her brother, after all. You guys went out and saw the Blue Man Group last night, right? What did you think?”

“It was… something, all right.” He let out another amused snort. “It was a lot different than I was expecting. I really wasn’t expecting the ponchos.”

They reached the kitchen and Steve stepped past, shooting the two of them an encouraging look as he did so. “Lot of that going around, lately. Things being different than expected, I mean. Not the ponchos,” he said, making his way over to the fridge and starting to take a few things out.

Nat nodded. “True,” she said, directing Bucky and Pietro to a table off to the side while Steve got their lunch ready. “I mean, you and your sister didn’t turn out to be anything like what we expected.” She paused as they sat down, letting a moment of awkward silence do the work for her and coax out a response.

“…I guess I could say the same about the Avengers,” Pietro said after a second, a little reluctantly.

“Oh?” Nat tilted her head quizzically. “How so?”

Pietro exhaled in a long sigh. “I don’t know. I just… Wanda wanted to work with you, but we’d done so much just to get to the point where we could go after Stark, and it all just…” he gestured vaguely with a hand. “And then we saved all those women. Your sister and the other Widows. It was good.”

“Thank you, by the way. I don’t remember if I ever said that to you. You didn’t need to help, but you did.”

“Wanda told me about what the Red Room did to them… what it did to you,” he averted his eyes, jaw working as he tried to find the right words. “I couldn’t just let them keep going. If Tony Stark helped and I didn’t, what would that make me?”

“You sound a lot like Wanda sometimes, you know?” Bucky said, chuckling slightly. “That’s basically the same thing she said to Steve about me. ‘Who would I be if I refused to help, just because it might be a little dangerous?’.”

Pietro smiled at that. “Yeah. She’s a good person.”

“So are you,” said Nat gently. “You’re just trying to do the right thing, right? Just like the rest of us.”

“I guess so.”

“Wanda’s been worried about you, you know.”

“I don’t…” he looked around, obviously a little bit uncomfortable airing things out in the group setting, but not completely unwilling. “Yeah. She always worries about me when she should be worrying about herself.”

 

--

 

Taking a deep breath, I knocked on the apartment door. After a moment, an attractive middle-aged woman with long, chestnut hair answered the door. A wedding band hung from a chain around her neck. “Hello?”

“Hi! You must be May Parker,” I said, smiling brightly. “My name’s Wanda Maximoff.”

Her return smile was warm and genuine. “Uh, hi! Nice to meet you, Wanda. How can I…?”

“I’m from Stark Industries,” I lied, pulling out a small ID card that had been printed for me last week and holding it up for a few seconds, my forefinger hiding the word ‘VISITOR’ from view. “I was actually wondering if Peter was around?”

I tucked the card away before she could look at it too closely. The card was actually labelled with the Avengers logo, not Stark Industries, but I was gambling that May would assume that was basically the same thing so long as I just bulled ahead. I was wearing some smart casual business attire I’d ‘acquired’ to help sell the lie, too—nothing fancy, just a white blouse with a charcoal-grey pencil skirt and matching jacket, along with a pair of practical leather flats.

She blinked in surprise. “Oh! Yes, he is.”

“That’s fine, I was just hoping to talk to him for maybe ten, fifteen minutes? Mr Stark is currently putting together a new scholarship program for gifted students—it’s called the September Foundation—and we have a list of initial candidates that we’re interviewing to potentially offer grants to.”

“Wow, okay. And you have your eye on Peter? That’s amazing!” She grinned widely as she stepped back, opening the door wider. “Please, come in.”

The apartment was warmly furnished, with several large table lamps spread around the main living room on side tables and on a shelving unit. The furniture was mismatched, but in a deliberately aesthetic-seeming way, the pieces coming together thematically with complementary colours. Several framed pieces of art hung on the walls between wall sconces helping to further light up the space. The front door essentially led directly to the main living room and May led me through toward a dark grey corduroy couch flanked by two armchairs in different styles around a clutter-covered low wooden coffee table.

I paused next to the couch and May smiled at me again. “If you want to just wait a moment, I’ll go get Peter.”

“Sure thing.”

She disappeared down a hallway, leaving me to my own devices. I heaved a sigh as I glanced around the apartment, taking in the details just in case I ever wanted to portal directly here. I didn’t really like lying to May, but I needed to talk to Peter privately and there were limited ways I could do that without stalking him until I could ambush him on the street, which seemed worse. The September Foundation was a decent enough cover… It hadn’t actually started giving out grants yet, but Tony had spoken about the upcoming program a couple of times so it should hold up pretty well to scrutiny if she did any poking around.

After a few minutes, May returned with a pair of young teens in tow, both of them looking at me curiously: Peter Parker and his best friend, Ned Leeds. Peter was relatively skinny but handsome for his age, slightly baggy clothes concealing what I knew were wiry muscles. Ned was darker-skinned—Filipino if I remembered correctly—and round. Overweight, but not in a hugely unhealthy way.

“Peter, this is Wanda,” May introduced us, smoothing her skirt with her hands nervously. “Oh, and this is Ned, Peter’s friend.”

I offered a hand and Peter shook it uncertainly. Ned stuck his hand out as well, a giant grin plastered across his face, and I smiled and shook it, too. “Nice to meet the both of you.”

“Um, so May said you were here about a scholarship program?” Peter asked, sounding a little confused.

“Yep. I was hoping I could talk to you privately for ten minutes or so?” I flashed May an apologetic look. “If that’s okay? Sorry, we prefer to do the interviews one-on-one, we find we get better results.”

An uncertain look creased May’s forehead for a moment before vanishing. She nodded. “Yeah, that’s fine with me. Peter?”

“Yeah, that’s fine. Um, we could go to my room?” He pointed back over his shoulder with his thumb.

“Sounds good to me.”

Peter did an uncertain little half-step shuffle backwards, obviously nervous, before turning properly and heading back down the hall to his room, glancing back at me the whole way. I shot May another smile, bobbing my head in thanks as I moved past her and Ned to follow Peter.

I looked around as I stepped inside the teen’s bedroom. There was a dartboard on the wall behind the door and a couple of posters hung up. At the far end was a window, the plain white curtains hanging open to show a view of the streets below. Flanking it was a desk on one side and a bed on the other. The desk was piled high with clutter, an ancient macintosh of some description surrounded by salvaged electronics. I noted the access hatch in the ceiling, where I knew he would, at some stage, be hiding his makeshift costume. Was it up there right now? I wasn’t sure.

I closed the door firmly behind us and turned the deadbolt, locking it, then turned back to face him with a wicked grin on my face.

Peter’s eyes widened slightly with alarm. “Why, uh, so what… what made you think I was a good candidate for the grant?”

“I know your secret, Peter.”

“My uh, secret? I don’t, I don’t have any secrets. What do you mean? I don’t know… uh. No secrets here,” he said, stammering the whole time. “What, uh, what do you mean?” He folded his arms, trying to look casual.

“It’s okay, you don’t need to be nervous,” I said, a bit more gently. “I get that you’ve been grappling with this by yourself for a while, but that’s the reason I’m here. So that you know you don’t have to deal with it alone.”

His face fell a bit. “…You’re, uh, you’re not actually from Stark Industries… are you?”

I shook my head. “Not exactly, no. I am currently working with Tony, though I’m not an official part of the team just yet.” Raising my hand, I summoned wisps of red energy, letting them play across my fingers.

Peter was mesmerised, nervousness momentarily forgotten, his eyes wide and round as he watched the display. “You’re with the Avengers?” he breathed.

“Like I said: not officially

, not yet, but yes.” With a gesture, I sent threads of energy upward to give the access hatch in the ceiling a firm telekinetic push out of the way. I was rewarded by Peter’s homemade costume dropping out, dangling from a strap. Peter snapped into motion almost immediately, practically diving past me to grab it and throw it into his open wardrobe in a panic, then turning and trying to block my view of it with his body.

“Uh, what are you, what do you want with me?” he asked nervously, leaning against the frame of the open wardrobe in what might possibly have been the absolute worst attempt as feigned casualness I’d ever seen.

“Peter,” I said patiently. “Can you just calm down for a second? I clearly know you’re Spider-Man—I even knew where you hide your costume—and pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about is not going to work, so can we just skip to the part where you hear me out?”

“…Okay,” he said quietly, his expression putting me in mind of a guilty puppy who’d just been caught making a mess.

“Look, I’m not here to get you in trouble. You’re running around as a vigilante, so I get being worried, but I’m definitely not a cop. I know things have been hard, between what happened with Uncle Ben and getting these powers. You’ve been through a lot.” I gestured toward the wall, pointing back toward the living room. “You both have, and I get not wanting to burden May.”

I saw Peter react when I mentioned his uncle, but he did his best to school his expression, swallowing his anxiety. “What do you want?”

“I just want to help. Firstly, I wanted to make sure you had someone you could talk to about this sort of thing. If you need help or advice about your powers, or just want to decompress and have someone you can talk to without being stressed about hiding anything, I’m around.”

“I…” he nodded slowly. “Okay. That’s… that might be nice?”

“Secondly, what I’d really like to do is pitch to the other Avengers a sort of… youth program. You’re not the only young person with powers or, at least, you won’t be. My plan would be to propose you as the first potential candidate as a future Avenger-in-training.”

Peter inhaled sharply at that. “Woah.”

I wandered over to his desk as I continued talking, absently looking over the assortment of electronic parts he’d gathered. “I don’t want to get your hopes up. They might say no, though I don’t think they will. But I wanted to talk to you first, because I didn’t want to just go ahead and out you to the rest of the team—I knew your identity, for uh, reasons, but I wanted you to have a say before I went ahead. If you’re not interested, if you want to keep Spider-Man low profile, that’s your choice to make and I wanted you to be able to make it without feeling pressured to say yes because it was Iron Man and Captain America asking.”

“Are you serious?” he asked, shaking his head in disbelief. “This is just… woah. I don’t know what to say.”

I glanced over and shot him a grin. “I’m serious. I want to get you the support you need to become a real hero.”

Peter suddenly straightened up, a slightly confused expression on his face.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I don’t—”

He was cut off by a sudden cracking sound as the window next to me shattered. I flinched, hissing through my teeth as a sharp pain stabbed into my ribs just below and behind my armpit. A half-second too late, I realised that Peter’s danger sense must have just gone off. My hand went to my back as I stumbled forward a few steps, closing around something and pulling it free. Peter and I exchanged a look, both of us staring for half a moment at the hypodermic tranquilizer round clutched in my hand.

“Shit!” I lunged forward, grabbing Peter and pressing us both against the wall behind his bed, out of the sightlines of the window.

A second later, there was a tinkling of glass followed by a hiss and thunk as something hit the floor near the bed. Quickly glancing at Peter to make sure he was okay—he was fine, just bright red from suddenly being pinned between me and the wall—I peeked around to see a rapidly expanding cloud of smoke or gas or whatever coming out of some kind of grenade.

My throat constricted slightly and I found myself coughing, my eyes starting to sting and water, as I flicked my hand toward the grenade. A jolt of red telekinetic energy scooped it up and flung it straight back out the window, smashing through a bit more of the glass that was still stuck in the frame before tumbling down out of view.

Almost simultaneously, there was a loud but muffled crunch from the living room, following by shouting voices and a fear-filled scream.

“May!” Peter yelled, eyes wide with panic.

We both reacted at once, pulling away from the wall and going for the door. I stumbled a little, but turned the deadbolt with a gesture and burst of magic just as Peter grabbed the handle to wrench it open. This was bad. I needed to… my thought process was halted as there was another tinkling of glass behind us and I ducked and spun, thrusting out a hand to stop another grenade dead in the air before it hit the ground. Just as I flicked my fingers to send it back the way it had come, it exploded in an overwhelming blast of light and sound.

I clenched my eyes shut with a yelp of surprise and pain, jerking backward and bouncing off of Peter. Blinded and deafened, I groped around, grabbing at his shirt before it was wrenched from my grip. A second later, my hands found that the door had been flung open. As I staggered through into the hall, I fumbled in my pockets and pulled out my sling ring. Another stabbing pain bloomed in the dead centre of my back—did I just get fucking hit with another tranq?—and I almost dropped the ring, fumbling to slip it on as I pulled myself past the doorframe and crashed into the hall, out of sight of the sniper. I was starting to feel a bit woozy.

Cracking my eyes open, I peered blearily ahead. Black shapes resolved into men in body armour—a SWAT team? HYDRA? I had no idea what was happening—brandishing assault rifles. I thrust out a hand, sending a bolt of energy smashing into one hard enough to knock him flat, even as I telekinetically wrestled his gun from his grasp with a sharp follow-up gesture. Two more levelled their weapons at me and I raised a hand to intercept the shots, but my power felt slippery, twisting in my grasp, and I didn’t manage to call up a shield in time before another two tranquilizer rounds slammed into my stomach and ribs.

I thrust both hand out toward them and screamed incoherently, sending a wave of magic down the hallway that scattered them like bowling pins, then nearly fell forward onto my face. Where was Peter? I caught myself on the wall and stumbled toward the living room. No way I was going to be able to focus enough to make a portal like this—I could barely see straight. I struggled with my jacket, trying to pull out my phone. I almost felt drunk. My fingers weren’t working right, and I could barely work it out of my pocket.

As I stumbled into the living room, the phone came free of my jacket and immediately slipped out of my grasp, skittering across the floor and coming to rest near the feet of the room’s other occupants.

“Just don’t hurt her, please!” Peter begged, his hands held up with the palms facing out.

In front of him, a large, black-and-white-armoured man with a face-concealing helmet had May on her knees, one hand firmly gripping her hair to keep her in place, the other with its bulky, nasty-looking hydraulic gauntlet currently pressed to the woman’s temple. May’s face was streaked with tears. “Peter!” she sobbed.

I blinked, trying to clear my vision, and noticed that the armour May’s assailant was wearing wasn’t actually black and white, it was black, with a skull and crossbones spraypainted in white across the helmet and chest. HYDRA. There was another man in body armour lying unmoving on the ground, a string of webbing still attached to his helmet. Ned was lying flat on the floor as well, his hands behind his head, looking terrified.

“Let her go,” I tried to say, but the words slurred badly—I couldn’t feel my tongue. I tried lifting a hand threateningly toward him. There was the pop of gunfire to my right and three dull thuds at my hip, shoulder, and bicep informed me that I’d been hit by three more tranquilizer rounds. "Three darts is too much," I gurgled, the words smearing together in my mouth.

My knees buckled for a moment before my legs collapsed out from under me, my vision growing dark around the edges. I couldn’t think. I could hardly breathe. The last thing I saw was Peter, looking absolutely terrified as the black-armoured men pushed him to the ground and shot him full of tranquilizers.