A Secret Or A Heartbreaking Revelation? Wanda And Rocket Have More In Common Than One Would Think.

A secret or a heartbreaking revelation? Wanda and Rocket have more in common than one would think.

the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip.✮ part six. idaho. washington.

the raccoon, the witch, & the roadtrip masterlist prev | next [est june 25] | main masterlist

angst, comfort, friendship, & fluff for @hibatasblog rocket & wanda | part 6/7 | word count: 2210.

our heroes share their secrets.

During a watch party for Avengers: Endgame on Twitter, Markus revealed the idea to team Wanda with the Guardian of the Galaxy captain actually made it into several versions of the film's script. "We had whole drafts with Wanda on a road trip with Rocket," Markus wrote, "but after the Vision plot in Infinity War, nothing we came up with was anything but wheel spinning for her character." CBR

The city of Missoula spreads out underneath them like a lakeful of stars or a well of distant coins, glimmering in the night-velvet hug of the mountains. When the sun crests the horizon, they'll make their way through Idaho and onto the last little part of their journey — but for now, Wanda leans against the open window of the bed-and-breakfast where they’ve holed up for the night and lets the Montana breeze kiss the ends of her hair. She closes her lashes, and for a moment, she can almost imagine it’s Vis, leafing through her crimson locks with gentle, marveling hands. 

You’re only gonna become someone’s nightmare.

Well, she thinks savagely — she’s always been someone’s nightmare. They hadn’t decided to call her a witch for no reason. Made by circumstance and bastardized science — layers of folded power. Sure, people fear Danvers for her strength, too — but Danvers has blond hair and an impulsive, crooked smile. For some reason, blond hair and an easy smile always seem to set the rest of the Avengers at ease, as if it’s skin and hair color that make a person good. 

Wanda — with her dark eyes lit from within and her hellish tendrils of magic — stands no chance when compared to a woman who radiates iridescent power like something avenging and divine. No — the Scarlet Witch is made of nightmares, and she has been since long before Hydra. The only ones who have looked at her with anything other than trepidation or terror or disdain were her adopted parents, and Pietro, and Vis.

And now, perhaps Rocket. 

Yes, she’d made the captain of the Guardians of the Galaxy nervous — she can tell. But that was a fear she’d earned — a result of her less-than-noble confession. If Rocket had been anxious in that last hour on the road, it hadn’t been because of who she is. 

Or what she is. 

She sighs, and leans out into the breeze.

“Don’t go making any magic cities out there, now.”

She half-turns, casting a look over her shoulder. He’s sauntering up beside her, scrabbling up onto the desk chair next to the window to peer out over the sweep of the midnight city, studding the valley like a jewelry-box full of diamond strands. From this angle, she can see the lights catching and flickering in his eyeshine, turning them into flat red coins and then back again. She feels one brow arch.

“We’re making jokes about it now?”

He shrugs, peering down into the spangled mountainside. “What’s the alternative?” A sideways smirk. “I blow you up?”

She snorts. “You could try.”

His grin widens. 

Well, his fear has apparently been short-lived. Something about that feels like a quiet reassurance — a flicker of candleflame in the winter solstice of her life.

“You’re not worried about me turning myself into a monster?” she asks anyway. She’s trying to make it sound light, but the words are laced with bitterness and salt.

He shrugs. “Not yet.” He raises his own brow and slants her a calculated glance. “Hopefully not ever.”

She keeps her eyes on the city, unwilling to spare him her own stare. 

“Where’d you, uh, get your powers anyway?” he asks after a moment. The words ripple in the cool night air. “Lab or infinity stone?”

She huffs a soft, almost-laugh. “How do you know I wasn’t born with them?”

“What, like Dazzler?” he asks doubtfully. 

She tears her eyes from the valley now, brow creased. “You know Dazzler?” 

He shrugs. “Sure. She sings, doesn’t she? Wouldn’t mind getting some of her stuff on the zune, actually.”

An incredulous chuckle bursts in the back of her throat like a ripe cherry. “Not like Dazzler,” she concedes. “Dazzler has a genetic condition—”

“That makes her cool as hell,” Rocket supplements, and Wanda offers an acquiescing half-shrug laced up with a half-smile.

“That makes her cool as hell,” she concedes. “I was born with — something else. And then, I think—” she pauses, feeling the crease form between her brow. “Well. Whatever it was, it was enhanced, I guess.”

“Lab then,” Rocket says, and sighs. “How come so many of you Terran-types can walk into labs and say, hey, fuck me up, with no frickin’ regard to your own lives and bodies? And then you come out with cool powers and super-strength and shit?” He scowls down at the city and his next words are so low under his breath that she almost doesn’t hear them. “Need a t-shirt that says, all I got was chronic pain and indigestion.”

She could leave it. Pretend she hadn’t heard him, which is probably what he’d intended. But for whatever reason, his sarcasm always seems to pull out these bite-sized heart-to-hearts from her. “Anxiety and depression.”

He blinks up at her, nonplussed. “What?”

“My t-shirt. I got experimented on! And all I got was anxiety and depression.”

He holds her eyes, his own rounding out, then flicking away. “Yeah, well. You say yaro root, I say yaro fruit.”

She lets the moment slide through her fingers, lingering and bittersweet over the star-spattered valley. “Besides,” she says, and she’s surprised to hear a thread of humor weaving together her own words, “I’m special. I was made by an infinity stone and in a lab.” She feels the corner of her mouth twist. She hadn’t been going to admit it, but why not? Who else would she ever tell, now that Vis is gone? “Labs, actually. I think.”

His ears flicker. “Plural? Wait, how’d that happen?”

The twist turns into a quiet smirk. When was the last time she’d smirked? “Which one?”

He furrows his brow. “The first. No, the most recent. Both.”

She braces her forearms on the window sill and leans out further, letting the wind whisk her words away: keeping them as short-lived as a luna moth. Maybe shorter. There’s safety in the brevity of the words, in how transparent and transitory they seem when they’re caught up and spiraled in the shadowed mountain-breeze. 

“I remember the second one best. I was older, and — foolish. And fixated on revenge for the loss of my parents.” She gives him a sideways look. “The horrors of the universe, you know. Pietro and I had been orphaned and adopted, only to be orphaned again. I joined a — well, I joined the bad guys, I guess, and I let them experiment on me with the mind stone. It was before anyone really knew what the mind stone was. At the time, I thought it gave me my powers, but now…” She hesitates.

Rocket stares at her, then scowls. “I meant what I said earlier. What is with you morons walkin’ into labs like that? Sure, I don’t know what this glowing rock is. Hit me with it,”  he mimicks — but there’s something half-shrill underneath his voice, clenched into the back of his teeth. She wonders if it’s concern, just a decade or two too late. “You know, I kinda liked Banner at first. He seemed like a genius-idiot, and — you know—” He holds up two fingers, a scant half-inch apart. “—tiny little temper problem. Kinda like me. But he did that to himself?” Rocket clicks his tongue against his teeth. “Thought I liked Steve too, but he just walked into a situation with strangers and said, yeah, gimme this highly-experimental drug and let’s see what frickin’ happens.” He shakes his head. “You morons are reckless. And ungrateful.”

She hums. And she doesn’t deny it. 

“But now, what?”

She blinks and casts him a questioning glance. 

“You said, you thought the stone gave you your powers. But now. But now what?”

She grimaces, dark-cherry brows furrowed. Not a thing slips past him, apparently. “I don’t know,” she admits. “Maybe it was just a dream. But—”

She hesitates, and he waits — surprisingly patient.

She takes a breath. She can already tell the words are going to hollow her out. She tries to say his name so little, because it guts her every time, and because so few of the Avengers seem to want to hear it.

And she has no-one else to listen.

“Vis never had a childhood,” she says at last. “Not a bad one or a good one — just none at all. The idea of it — all the complexities of physical development combined with cognition and learning and vulnerability — it meant so much to him. He thought it was beautiful, and strange. One of the great mysteries of the universe, he said.” The last few words are strangled. She’d opened her mouth and said his name, and it had floated up out of her like a butterfly tethered to ghostly memories she’d tried to keep down. Ribbons and bows in the tail of a haunted kite. Each word starts to drift up and out of her and she just knows, if she doesn’t choke them back, they’ll keep rising. And while she’s happy to sacrifice the words of her own past to the nightsky, every bit of Vis is too precious and rare to let them slip away into midnight mountain breezes.

“He’d always ask about mine,” she finishes abruptly, shrugging. The words quietly click the whole story closed. “The more he asked, the more I think I remembered.” 

Of course, Rocket doesn’t let anything rest, she’s learning. Not unless it suits him. He squints one gleaming red eye up at her. 

“What’d you remember?”

She looks out on the sea of tiny lights, like fireflies and gemstones and stars. Over seventy-three thousand little lives, all cradled in the palms of a single mountain range on an unremarkable little planet the midst of a galaxy and universe far wider than she can ever really know.

“I think it was another lab,” she says quietly. “One in the mountains. Not like these mountains — more severe. Cliffs and crags. It felt….haunted.” She takes a steadying breath. “I think there was a man — cold. Casually cruel. He would be silhouetted against these vaulted glass windows overlooking a sheer drop, staring down at me and Pietro. I could feel his disdain — even as a child.” She hesitates. “Sometimes he would hold my head in his hands and stare into my eyes like he was trying to see into my brain. I remember having nightmares after we were adopted. I would dream that he carved into my skull while I was sleeping, to try to find where I kept it.” She shivers. “The magic.”

She can feel Rocket shuttering closed next to her, and she supposes she’s already said too much. Made things uncomfortable between them — been too vulnerable. These intimate little exchanges are never supposed to last more than a handful of sentences, but here she is: spilling them out onto Missoula, as personal and quiet as if she were on a midnight walk with Vis, or curled up beside Pietro in their dark orphanage bed.

But then Rocket sighs beside her, and even in her periphery, she can see his stiff shoulders loosen. He wedges his own forearms against the sill, mimicking her posture as he leans out over Missoula too. She turns her head slowly to look at him, and the breeze that has been playing with her hair now ruffles his fur, too.

“I knew a guy like that once,” he says roughly. “I knew a guy — too much like that.”

She inhales, more slowly than she has since long before she’d ever heard of Thanos. She thinks she can remember the last time she took in air like this: the morning before the Black Order had found them in the streets. She’d stretched against the faded sheets of the bed she’d shared with Vis, and everything had come easy — even her breath. 

She exhales — just as slow.

“I don’t trust my memory,” she admits. “I was a child. Maybe I made it all up.”

Rocket grunts. “Don’t sound like something little humie gargoyles just make up.”

She huffs a laugh. “Maybe not, but my adult-mind says he can’t possibly be real,” she tells him quietly. “My memories make him into too much of a… a ghost story. Too much of a legend, or a monster under the bed. A caricature of what he probably really was.”

Rocket doesn’t look at her, but she can see him raise his eyebrow doubtfully. “Prob’ly we all do that with the things that fucked us up when we were kids,” he concedes grudgingly, and she shifts uncomfortably. How to make Rocket understand? The imposing figure, so severe — the words, so cultured and sophisticated — the surrealism of the mountain, snowy and mist-shrouded, stabbing the sky? It’s too fantastical to be real. She’d told Rocket her secret, perhaps ill-advised dream of a town based on the old TV shows she’d seen her childhood; how can she explain how these shadows of her childhood seem like the other side of the coin? She thinks of the man again, and all she can picture is a caricature of a cartoon villain.

“In my memory, I think he always wore all purple,” she explains. Like a uniform. Wanda shakes her head, frustrated. It’s not clear enough. She inhales again, slow and steady. She exhales again — just as measured. When she speaks, her voice is hushed, and she can’t keep that old childhood terror from seeping in at the edges. “In my memory, I think he came back one day without a face.”

scarlet witch was one of the high evolutionary’s subjects in the citadel of science at mount wundagore pass it on. look this is a fluffpiece so will anything come of this? not beyond a lil bit of emotional bonding. maybe volume three would play out a bit differently but we're not going that far. still, i couldn't bear to leave this bit in the comics ♡♡

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