Cherry || b.barnes

43 || Rattail

»Peter?« I ask, almost entirely sure I'm hallucinating. My voice is stuck in my throat, choking me, and I barely can remember any word ever coming out of me sounding so broken.

Slowly, I weep back, getting to sit on my legs, kneeing in front of Peter. Gaze roaming over him, shock rippling through me when I see the change of color in his skin.

This can't be. This can't be either. He was a skeleton minutes or hours ago; I don't really know how much time passed. I feared ripping my own skin when my hands were searching for wounds on his lifeless body. His eyes were empty, so fucking empty.

And now, they're looking at me. Tired and exhausted and the flame inside them is nothing anymore but ignited ashes, but it's alight. »H-How are you-« I look at him, see him blinking slowly. See him trying to figure the same thing out I do. »You were dead. I-I took your life. I don't understand, I-« feel something hard, something strong kicking into my ribcage.

Unaware of how I could possibly have missed their entrance, I'm catapulted across the room. There's not much time to react; the speed I'm flying through the air with is far too high to make any chance of defense available. Meaning, I'm sliding across the counter of the bar on the other side of the room, right before I crash into Tony Stark's liquor collection and then drop onto the ground like a domino. Cold fluid is spilled all over me, including glass shards from the loud shattering bottles that came with my hit, and the stench of alcohol makes me wrinkle my nose, shake all over again. Instantly, my back feels sore. As do my hands when I lift myself up, fast, and run the shards spread across the floor into my skin meanwhile.

I don't know what's going on, but I won't let anything happen to Peter. Again.

The horrific thrumming inside me is showing once more, but it is much quieter. On top of that, I already know what's incoming this time, and prepare to keep my gates closed. All my gates. Biting away the pain that comes with my back feeling like rolled over a hundred hedgehogs, surely me not only being soaked in cause of liquor but the burning of alcohol mixing with blood, my hand is raised before I register who got me away from the boy. This time, when the red aura spills out of me like it usually does out of Wanda, red-lighting snakes creeping through the air, I know how to differ.

Maybe not really good, and maybe not entirely, but I now know that the thrumming inside me hasn't been Wanda's power. It's been mine.

I can't let it freak me out now or put any attention on the how and why. How I got this power. How I am obviously able to both take and give lives. Why I can't control it. Why it is only showing up now that I'm twenty, and never before.
I got more important things to focus on right now. Meaning, that these questions are adding to the ones already claiming part of my time as theirs once I let them.

But only five seconds in, I sweat again from the effort that is keeping this power, whatever it is, in control.

It is then that I take a closer sight of who's now hovering in the air and straining my energy reserves with how much anger is spilled through his suit, with his hard try to get out of the grasp of the power of the Scarlet Witch, directed by me. Causing me to immediately let go, and hear the collision of iron on laminate floor with a dull pang in my ears.

Stark doesn't even bother me. He's right on Peter's side again, and only when I step closer quietly, I'm able to overhear what they're whispering. This whirlwind today and all the other passed days does something to my senses. How come I can't hear people entering, how come I can't hear what they're saying properly although I should, but Stark hitting the ground still rings in my ears? Nothing makes sense anymore. I'm left in a space of utter blackness, tapping through a colorless nothingness with no guide.