Broken Glass

The door was open, the spell had been lifted. Wanda didn't know where she was.

"My boys," she said, thinking only of her sons who would be terrified to wake to find their mother gone. She saw a hallway through the door ahead of her. Was it a portal? She didn't know. She barely knew anything. Flashes. That's all she saw. Magic. Blood. Pain. Fear. Death. They swirled through her mind. Wanda didn't know what had happened, but she knew it wasn't good. She did know that her best chance at getting out was through that door, so off she flew.

Her knees nearly buckled when she landed. Wanda felt like she had been hit by a bus and then some. But her screaming feet nearly dropped her to her knees. She had run over broken glass barefoot. Her feet were covered in glass-embedded gashes that bled with every painful step she took. She limped down the hallway. Only thoughts of Billy and Tommy kept her from collapsing from utter exhaustion.

As Wanda made her way through the tunnels and into the atrium, she saw the chaos that had been left behind. Everything was destroyed: the walls had been reduced to rubble, windows smashed, robot sentries laid torn apart and covered in their own oil. But the bodies...those ripped the air from her lungs. Captain Carter was halved. Professor X was slumped in his chair, his neck bent awkwardly at an angle. Black Bolt's head looked deflated. And Mr. Fantastic...Wanda only realized his fate when she felt the blue goo sticking to the soles of her bloody feet. A wave of nausea swept over her and it took all of her concentration not to empty the contents of her stomach everywhere. Swallowing the bile, she thought of the lives that had been torn apart. Suddenly she felt herself hit the floor. Her body had given out. The possession had drained her of every ounce of energy. The Scarlet Witch was an immensely powerful being: Wanda was lucky she hadn't died during the ordeal. She didn't have much left in her, but she summoned up every ounce of strength she had left and flew towards her boys.

Home. She was home at last. The boys were still asleep on the couch right where she'd left them before she...but it wasn't her, was it? She hadn't done those awful things, murdered those innocent people in cold blood, chased them down that tunnel. It was the Scarlet Witch who was responsible for this brutality. But as the blood poured down her face, the guilt poured just as freely.

"Don't wake the boys," she thought. "I can't let them see me like this."

Wanda limped her way to the bathroom and shut the door, leaving a trail of blood behind her. When she turned on the lights and saw her reflection she froze. The water Doctor Strange used to slow her down had washed most of the blood and oil from her face, but her clothes were still stained. As she stared in the mirror the flashbacks started: her body had been used as a vessel for unspeakable evil and she had been forced to watch from inside her own mind.

She knew this other Wanda. She dreamt of her. That Wanda had known unbelievable sorrow not unlike her own. They had both lost so much, but she had her boys: the Scarlet Witch did not. Hers were a product of her grief whereas her own Tommy and Billy were of flesh and blood. That grief tore the Scarlet Witch apart with each passing day. Wanda dreamt of her night after night and bore witness to her descent into the madness of the Darkhold. She felt for her but there was nothing she could do. The Darkhold had become the North Star in the Scarlet Witch's sky, guiding her towards corruption.

Wanda stripped off her soaked, blood-stained clothes and threw them in the trash. She didn't want anything to remind her of what she'd done. But the blood pouring down from the gash between her eyes said otherwise. She turned the shower on and grabbed a tissue from the box on the counter. Wanda blotted at the blood as best she could but the wound wouldn't stop bleeding. She sighed, threw the tissue out, and stepped into the shower where she stood and let the water wash over her. Blood, grime, and dirt washed down the drain. So did her tears. She sobbed. The tears were a result of pain, anger, sorrow, and guilt. She hadn't murdered those people and terrorized that girl. That was the Scarlet Witch. But Wanda was the Scarlet Witch, and a Wanda was a Wanda in every universe. So in the grand scheme of the multiverse, she, Wanda Maximoff, had torn all of those lives apart.