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

T’Challa paused outside of the door leading to the cells where Wanda and Pietro Maximoff were being held, acknowledging the Dora Milaje flanking it with a small nod. In his mind, he recalled the Red Woman’s snarling face when she’d buried a spear in the wall an inch from his little sister’s face. How she had wormed her way into a royal audience by invading Okoye’s mind. How helpless he’d felt when he’d moved to protect his father and she’d tossed him aside with her magic like a ragdoll. The faces of the terrified priestesses when they’d told him of the theft of the Heart-Shaped Herb. The sensation of the blade pressed to his throat when Wanda had forced him to concede the earlier battle.

Shuri had told him not to come to see them by himself, to at least have some of the Dora with him. Seeing his little sister still so afraid of the Red Woman tore him up inside. There were few things that could shake Shuri’s resolve, and trying to talk to her about what had happened when the Maximoffs had escaped Wakanda was the first time he’d ever seen genuine fear in her eyes. If he had his way, she would never have cause to feel like that again. Taking a deep breath, he pushed down all of the anger his thoughts had conjured up. He needed to be smart, here, not let his emotions get the better of him.

He stepped forward, moving through the door as it slid open and closed behind him. Inside, their two prisoners stopped the conversation they were having and looked over toward him. Pietro practically glowered, anger and frustration clearly painted across his face, but Wanda’s expression was unreadable.

“Prince T’Challa,” she said, a little bit of tightness in her voice. “We weren’t expecting you to visit.”

“Neither was I,” he responded, walking slowly up to the bars of her cage. When Wanda stood up to face him, however, he hesitated, stopping short.

She noticed, of course. The corner of her mouth quirked upwards in a wry smile. “I don’t bite.”

An image of the AI wearing Wanda’s face darting forward, mouth full of needle-like teeth aimed for Shuri’s wrist, flashed through T’Challa’s mind. “That remains to be seen.”

“What do you want?” Pietro demanded.

T’Challa glanced toward him. “Your sister… this thing we are fighting. This AI. It was birthed from her mind.” He turned back to Wanda and looked her over appraisingly. “I believe it is important to know who we are fighting.”

She let out a small laugh. “So you want to… what, get to know me better? Well, I really don’t like being put in a cage, for one. So there’s something.”

T’Challa hands balled themselves into fists. “You are fortunate that this is the extent of your punishment so far. You should be wearing a mark declaring your crimes for all to see.”

He felt a small amount of satisfaction as Wanda touched the side of her neck reflexively. He had pushed to have the twins branded for their crimes along with their imprisonment—their flesh permanently seared to mark them as filth, the lowest of thieves, to all who saw them—but that had been a dealbreaker for Captain Rogers and T’Challa had been forced to relent. Still, once the matter of the AI had been settled and the Maximoffs were formally tried by his father, there was no question that they’d be found guilty and marked as such before being tossed in a hole so deep and dark they would never see the light of day again. They were already making plans and preparations for how to respond if the Avengers violated their word and refused to accept the outcome of a fair trial.

“Look, T’Challa, I know you have reasons to not like me. I just…” she trailed off, a little uncertainty in her voice. “This is bigger than that. Not just the AI, I mean everything I’ve been dealing with. You don’t know what’s coming.”

“Your visions, yes. The Avengers have told us about them. A convenient excuse, are they not? A shield you can wield to justify whatever actions you please.”

“Was I wrong about Killmonger? I can’t imagine you didn’t try to track him down.”

“N’Jadaka is none of your concern. You do not know everything. Perhaps you did see the future, but things have changed since then. You did not foresee any of this, did you?”

Wanda’s jaw worked silently for a moment before she responded. “I’ve never claimed to know everything. I’ve just been trying to use what I know to do the right thing.”

“If you wanted to actually do the right thing, you would agree to have Bast’s stolen blessing removed from you.”

“No,” she said, meet his gaze defiantly.

He had to restrain himself from slamming his fist against the bars of her cell in frustration. Her theft of the Heart-Shaped Herb was a massive point of contention, even among his own people. If T’Challa had his way, they would have forcibly removed it from her as part of the deal with the Avengers, but it wasn’t that simple. The religious texts were all clear that the Herb was a gift of the goddess Bast and those who partook of it were judged worthy by Her to wear the mantle of the Black Panther, else it would turn to poison in their veins.

It was anathema that an outsider should have partaken. There was precedent for the Herb being stolen, but it had only ever happened a handful of times in thousands of years, had only ever involved another member of the Six Tribes, and had always been followed by a trial by combat to determine who would take up the mantle. Zuri had been extremely clear: the Red Woman lived, therefore had Bast’s blessing. She had to either be defeated in trial by combat—not something T’Challa was overly keen to try—or else choose to relinquish the Herb’s power freely. They could not force her and their agreement with the Avengers could not be contingent on it. T’Challa’s father, the king, had conceded the point. Bast’s will needed to be respected, not discarded when inconvenient.

“If you wanted to do the right thing, you’d set your wounded pride aside and let us help properly,” said Pietro, shaking his head as he leaned forward against the bars of his cell. “Keeping us locked up like this is stupid and counterproductive, and you know it.”

Biting back a scathing response, T’Challa settled for a sharp exhale of breath. “I see this was a waste of my time. A pity. I should not have bothered.” Turning on his heel, the Wakandan prince strode back toward the door.

“T’Challa!” the Red Woman called after him, a frustrated, pleading note in her voice.

He ignored her.

 

--

 

“Billy!” I lunged forward, reaching out desperately to grab my son, only to find myself lurching upright in my bed, my breath coming in deep, shuddering gasps as my eyes darted about wildly.

“Wanda! It’s me, it’s okay, you’re okay,” Pietro had pressed himself up against the vibranium bars, his fingers straining through to try to reach me. I could hear the anxiety and worry in his tone, though he tried to control it and sound soothing. “It was just a nightmare. Just another nightmare. You’re safe.”

I turned away, my feet finding the floor beside my bed as I blinked in the dim light and tried desperately to calm my frantically beating heart. We’d been given some a couple of sets of airy, grey clothing—matching tops and pants in a simple Wakandan cut, very plain but aesthetic in a strange sort of way—and mine stuck to my body, utterly drenched through with sweat.

This was the second night in a row we’d spent in the cells and both of them had been the exactly the same for me. Sleep had been hard to come by, the constant gnawing feeling of being trapped keeping me up with my mind racing through increasingly unpleasant scenarios around what the AI was out doing. An omnipresent feeling of dread clouded my waking thoughts, a constant feeling like the other shoe was about to drop. Then, when I finally had drifted off, my rest was plagued with nightmares… muddled up, fragmented snippets of domestic life with Vision, ending in various horrific ways—not watching it on a screen, but being there. My children reaching out, screaming, calling my name.

I physically flinched back at that thought, then leant forward and cradled my head in my hands. That wasn’t right. Original Wanda’s children. Not mine. Why did thinking about them hurt so much? I didn’t understand. I’d mostly avoided thinking about any of this until I was forced to when I was talking to everyone on Carol’s ship—I’d never even so much as mentioned Vision to Pietro before then—but the second I had it was like I’d ripped myself open. A dam had burst somewhere inside of me, all these emotions bubbling out like they’d just been waiting for a reason to reveal themselves.

The Ancient One’s question echoed in my head: ‘Are you Wanda Maximoff?’. Even beyond all of the muddled emotions, it was genuinely upsetting that I still had no good idea what the answer was.

“Wanda?” Pietro’s voice came again, a little more hesitantly. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah, I’m okay. Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“…I’m worried about you.”

“Join the club,” I said with a sigh, lying back down on my bed. I doubted that I’d be able to get back to sleep, but I felt exhausted still and I really needed to at least try.

After a minute, Pietro lay back down as well, though I could practically hear his hesitation. Eventually I heard his breathing change, becoming more regular and even as he drifted back off to sleep.

I lay awake for the rest of the night, alternating between tossing and turning to try to get comfortable and staring up blankly into the dark.

 

--

 

The next morning, Natasha came by again at the same time we were given breakfast. Over the last two days she seemed to be splitting her time pretty evenly between visiting us and whatever else she was doing, usually with one or two of the others tagging along. Steve and Bucky were regular visitors for chats—though not as frequently as Nat herself—Clint and Carol had come with Natasha twice, and even Bruce had stopped by once as well. It made sense. This was mostly Tony and Shuri’s show, after all—the two of them hip-deep in the development of some viruses they were hoping could put a dent in the AI—and the others were mostly just planning and making themselves useful where they could.

Wakanda had provided some diversions for Pietro and I when we didn’t have guests, which was surprisingly decent of them—a couple of books and a secure tablet-style computer with some simple games on it. I’d been kind of worried about how badly Pietro would chafe having his movements restricted, given he was usually even more restless than I was, but he’d immediately claimed the tablet and spent hours playing on it. I mostly read, but here and there I’d pretend to be napping and astral project… at least I still had that up my sleeve that no one here knew I could do, except for Pietro, of course.

Passing through the walls like a ghost, I had unrestricted access to wherever I wanted. At first, I just explored the Great Mound itself—the facility was huge and there was a lot to see. I spent a little bit of time just watching over various shoulders out of curiosity as people worked. It was interesting, getting a candid look behind the scenes at a scientific facility like this. I’m not sure what I expected, to be honest, but once you got past the aesthetics the place and people were just so… normal. There was an undercurrent of tension, as you’d expect from a country that had been under siege, but people laughed and joked with their colleagues, and I even watched one team celebrate what I presumed to be the birthday of one of their members, a young, awkward-looking guy named Tosin.

Dropping down into the vibranium mines in the depths of the mountain was an awe-inspiring experience. The excavated caverns were enormous. Glittering constellations of striated vibranium ore cut through the rock in thick bands, with maglev trains threading through the complex carrying equipment and mined ore from place to place. Most of the mining was done with large, semi-automated machines, with very few actual operators required… Watching the process, it all actually seemed quite slow to me. I’d obviously never seen the operations of a mine before, but I got the impression that because of the specific properties of vibranium they had to be especially careful and deliberate while mining it from the rock.

Today I’d flown down to the nearby city, threading my way through the streets and drinking in the sights and sounds. The air buzzed with the harmonious blend of traditional drums and humming of vibranium-powered vehicles gliding effortlessly along the sleek, polished roads. Towering skyscrapers, adorned with intricate tribal designs, reflected the golden glow of the afternoon sun—everywhere I looked, there was a seamless fusion of ancient traditions and cutting-edge technology. I wished that I could actually come down here in person, walk through the city streets and explore the place properly, rather than just floating through it all like a ghost.

I was watching a pair of small children playing and chasing a small group of scintillating, iridescent holographic butterflies when I felt something poke my back—my real, physical back. Immediately, I submerged myself deeper into the Astral Plane, watching the colours around me wash out as everything ground almost to a halt. Turning back the way I came, I willed myself forward and flew back toward Mount Bashenga. Emerging from the city, I traced my way up the side of the mountain, passing by the massive panther statue carved into the cliff, and quickly returned to my cell in the Great Mound.

As I arrived, I was surprised to see that we had a visitor—Tony Stark had come to see us, for the first time since we’d gotten here, nearly frozen mid-step as he approached us. The billionaire was wearing pure white clothes, cut in a fashionable Wakandan style, similar to the outfits that were favoured by many of the scientists that worked at the Great Mound. Pietro had stuck his fingers through the bars. I’d sat on the floor, my back leaning up against the bars dividing my cell from his, and asked him to give me a poke if I needed to wake up.

I landed back in my body and jerked slightly, blinking and rising to my feet. As far as Tony or anyone else could tell, I’d simply dozed off while sitting reading. I rose to my feet and shot him a frosty look. “I’m sorry, do I know you?” I asked, then glanced over at Pietro. “Who’s this guy? We don’t get a lot of strangers passing through here.”

“No idea, doesn’t look familiar to me,” Pietro said with a shrug.

Tony sighed. “I’ve been busy,” he said, a little testily. “Working out a way to clean up your mess. Remember?”

“Yeah, ‘my’ mess. Because the great Tony Stark acknowledging that it wasn’t just my fault might lead to a bit of self-reflection and accepting some culpability of his own, and we can’t have that, can we?” I scoffed, shaking my head, before wrapping my hands around the bars of my cell. Resting my forehead against the cool metal, I glowered at him. “I thought you were better than this, Stark. Used to be you’d at least take a girl out to dinner before trying to fuck her.”

Tony shot me an annoyed look. “This isn’t what I wanted either, you know,” he said, gesturing toward the cells. “This was the cost of doing business with Wakanda. You were the one who told us we had to come here in the first place, remember?”

“Oh, fuck you, Tony. This is exactly what you wanted.”

He sighed again, jaw working silently for a moment before he set his mouth in a small frown. “Look, I’ll be honest, I’m very glad that you’re not holding the Mind Stone anymore, but I wasn’t trying to get you put in a cage.”

“And you just seem super broken up about it.”

Tony closed his eyes for a moment and I could practically see him silently counting to three in his head before he looked at me again. “I didn’t come here to fight.”

“Why did you come, then?”

“Maybe I just wanted to make sure you were being treated well. Is that okay? That a good enough reason?”

Pietro snorted. “Not a believable reason.”

“I wanted to tell you that we’re getting close,” Tony said, ignoring him. “It still needs a bit more work—maybe another day—but I think we’ve got something that might work against her. She’ll probably be able to evade it but, if it gets onto her systems, it should hopefully be able to do some damage to her directly.”

I paused for a moment, my annoyance deflating and replaced with a small measure of hope. “How do we hit her with it?”

“A direct code injection would be the ideal, but we’d need to have some hardware with her on it for that to be viable,” he shrugged. “I’m thinking we head to the NEXUS.”

“That’s the world internet hub, right? In Oslo?”

Such a weird concept. I honestly didn’t know how that worked… I was never the most tech-savvy person, but having a single hub that every byte of data in the world flows through was basically the opposite of how I understood the internet to work.

Tony nodded. “She’ll be there, I’m pretty sure—fastest connection in the world. She was probably using it as a staging ground for her cyberattacks. Even if she’s not on their systems directly, it’d be the best place to release the virus into the wild. If we’re lucky, it’ll be dangerous enough to force her off the net and into a closed network.”

This was good. Great, even. If we could lock down the AI like Vision had locked down Ultron, she’d still be difficult to deal with, but she’d at least be mortal. I looked at him seriously. “I want to come with you, when you go for it. She might try to hit you back.”

His lips compressed into a tight line but he nodded again. “It’s our best shot at the moment, so we don’t want anything to mess up our chance. All hands on deck.”

I looked over at Pietro. “We’ll be ready. Just let us know when we’re good to go.”

 

--

 

I was tired. It was still early, I was pretty sure—we didn’t have a great sense of what time of day it was without checking the clock on Pietro’s games tablet, but the guards hadn’t come by to give us dinner just yet. Not that it mattered; with the difficulty I was having sleeping and the nightmares I’d been having, there was little chance my sleep tonight would be any more restful than it had been the previous two nights.

“So you’re the one they call the Red Woman.”

I almost jumped out of my skin at the sudden voice, dropping my book and losing my place as I jerked up to see who’d spoken. Pietro reacted similarly, almost losing his grip on his tablet. There was approximately one door leading into the room with our cells and neither of us had seen or heard anyone come in through it.

Standing outside my cell, looking in at me appraisingly, was Erik Stevens—AKA Killmonger. My book forgotten, I stood to face him. How on Earth… my eyes widened, taking in the clean white outfit of a Wakandan scientist. Fuck. I kicked myself mentally. I’d actually seen him before while exploring the facility in astral form and it just hadn’t registered in my mind. He was one of the people working with Shuri and Stark, and I’d been too focused on the two of them that I hadn’t really looked closely at the other scientists with them. That, plus I just wasn’t expecting to see him here at all.

“Killmonger…” I said quietly. In the cell adjacent to me, Pietro reacted to the name with a look of disbelief.

Killmonger grinned at me. “Nice to meet you in the flesh. I’ve heard a lot about you, Wanda.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I just wanted to have a little chat, privately,” he gestured upward vaguely. “We’ve got some time. The cameras will just show the two of you all by your lonesome.”

He’d hacked the cameras? A thought suddenly occurred to me that turned the blood in my veins to ice—had the AI contacted him somehow? Was he working with her? I took a deep breath. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Nah, I probably shouldn’t be. Couldn’t resist, though. You were the one who sent T’Challa after me, after all. I gotta thank you for that, by the way. It was easy enough to talk him down… He didn’t want to kill me, I could tell. He wanted a wayward cousin he could rescue, so I just gave him what he wanted.” He chuckled darkly. “See, everyone else here just sees what they want to see… but not you, right? You’ve seen much, much more than that.”

“I guess they’re just telling anyone about my visions, these days,” I said with a sigh.

“You’ve seen the future, so tell me: what do you think happens to you, after all of this? Once Wakanda and the Avengers deal with their little AI problem?” he asked. “Go on, prophesise for me, witch.”

I’d been trying not to think about it. Nothing good, I knew, but I had to trust the Avengers. We’d deal with it when it happened. “I don’t know,” I said, my tone betraying my thoughts. “It’s not important right now, not while we’re still fighting her.” I glanced reluctantly over at Pietro.

Killmonger snorted, a small smile playing across his features. “There’s only two ways my cousins will let you leave this cell: so they can bury you in an even deeper hole, or in a body bag.”

“What do you want?”

“You know what I want. I don’t give a shit about any offense you gave these assholes. I think we can help each other.”

I gave an incredulous little laugh. “Aren’t I the wrong colour to join your little race war?”

“The colour of your skin isn’t what’s important,” Killmonger said, shaking his head. “Your people are suffering too—I know what Sokovia’s like. Corrupt old money and politicians playing games without worrying about the lives they ruin; all those people just trying to get by. Isn’t that why you joined HYDRA in the first place? Try to get a little power, so you could make the world a little better?”

“You’ve done your research,” I acknowledged carefully.

He shot me a lopsided grin and shrugged. “Stark doesn’t want you anywhere near the Avengers. You wanted safe haven in Wakanda, right? That’s why you came here originally. If I’m on the throne, I can give it to you. I’m offering you a place in the most powerful nation on Earth. You could get in on the ground floor of the empire. Make a real difference.”

What was it about me that made villains want to try to recruit me? I raised a hand, red wisps of energy lashing out and wrapping around Killmonger’s body as I seized him with my telekinetic grip. “One thing you didn’t think about,” I said conversationally, applying a little bit of pressure. “You turned off the cameras, right? So no one’s going to be activating any alarms or countermeasures. There’s nothing to stop me from killing you: right here, right now.”

He didn’t even flinch, that frustratingly smug smile still on his face. “Nah, you won’t do that.”

“What makes you think I won’t?” I asked mildly.

“Because you’re either considering taking my offer, or you aren’t. If you are, well, then this is just you swinging your dick around, seeing if you can get something more. If you aren’t, then you won’t kill me because the second someone else walks in, that’s it: game over for you and the little cooperation you have going on between Wakanda and the Avengers. The AI wins and you die with claw marks in your chest.”

I exhaled sharply through my nose. “I could break your arms.”

He nodded, still frustratingly calm. “It’d be tricky for me to explain away, but I could do it. It might set me back a little, but the only thing you’d really be doing is pissing me off, with absolutely no benefit to yourself. It’d stop me from helping against the AI, too, and I think you know we need every hand on deck for that little problem.”

“It might make me feel a bit better,” I said, a dangerous edge to my tone.

Killmonger shook his head. “No, it won’t.”

“…No. It won’t,” I agreed, annoyed. I made a frustrated noise in the back of my throat and released him, dumping him unceremoniously on the floor with just a little more force than necessary.

He pulled himself to his feet, still smiling. “You don’t owe these people anything. Wakanda has done nothing but spit on you since you first came here. Why should you care what happens to them?”

“Because she’s a good person,” Pietro interjected. “And you’re not.”

Killmonger shook his head. “You think you know me from some visions you got of a future that’s not happening anymore. Alright, fine. Whatever you saw… does it actually matter, anymore? What about your actual future, the one that’s ahead of you right now?” He gestured toward my brother. “Your brother’s future? Because right now, Wakanda isn’t going to be any kinder to him than they will be to you.”

I’d been deliberately avoiding thinking too much about what was going to happen once this was all over, after the AI was dealt with. If we could deal with her. There wasn’t going to be any reconciliation with Wakanda, not that I could see from here—T’Challa was utterly set against me. Killmonger was, essentially, correct. But that didn’t mean my only option was to side with him.

He watched me carefully for a moment as I failed to respond, perhaps taking my silence for more than it was. Either way, he nodded. “I’m out for now. I’ll see you a bit later on. Think about what I said.”