Agony (Wanda Maximoff)

Chapter 66

||You cannot pick and choose what parts of her to love.||

The air smelled of rain and blood, surrounding Wanda like a blanket of death. Her hands shook as she stood on the roof, staring down at the girl with the tail.

Catseye.

Sharon.

Wanda's mouth tasted of copper, and she licked her lips, tasting her own blood. The magic she had used to shield the mutants had drained her completely, weakening her body to the point of a nosebleed. She'd used a good amount of her abilities that day with Ultron, but nothing like tonight.

The mutants mumbled at one another, their minds fuzzy with what had just happened. It took all of her strength to penetrate their conscious's, forcing them all to stop fighting so that Tony and Vision could attack without hurting them. She was so busy stopping the mutants that she somehow forgot about the lavender panther sprinting around.

She had forgotten about Catseye.

Her knees threatened to buckle as she glanced down at the beautiful panther below, her stunning lavender coat soaked in red. Emma sat beside her, the once beautiful sparkle of her skin now gone.

In the middle of the chaos, the Sentinels sat broken and dismembered. Sparks of electricity and smoke rose from them, up towards the sky, creating a cloud of dark gray and black. Tony, Vision and Thor had completely torn them apart with nothing more than just a single blast from their energy beams and Thor's lightning. It had happened so fast.

Wanda's legs shook as she stepped onto the roof's ledge, the blood from her nose trickling down into her mouth again. There must have been a lot of blood, because when she looked down at her suit, she saw the dark stains covering her chest. She leveled her hands beside herself, ready to use her magic one more time to lower herself down. But before her fingers glowed scarlet, Tony swooped down, picking her up.

"I got you, kid," he said to her, and she allowed herself to rest against him as he brought her down to the ground. She almost groaned as he set her down, her legs shaking slightly. "You don't look so good," he told her, the front part of his mask rising up. She swallowed down the blood that was in her mouth, cringing at the sour taste, and waved a hand at him.

"Some of the mutants are hurt," she breathed out, clenching her fists are a pain shot through her head. "Steve and Natasha are still inside," she added, resting against the bunker's wall. Tony stared at her for a moment, then his mask closed down, and he walked over to someone in the crowd, then flew up into the sky.

A second later, Nightcrawler was by her side. The hue of his blue skin looked somber as well, and she wondered if mutants naturally lost the light in themselves when one of them died. She wondered this because it is exactly what happened to her when Pietro died. That light inside of her just...turned off.

"I will take you to the jet. May I?" he gestured to her body, asking permission to pick her up, and she turned her heard towards her brother, who was standing still as a statue a few feet away. His eyes were focused on Catseye, and Wanda ached as she joined her conscious with his. He was blaming himself for her death. "Wanda?"

With the taste of her own blood in her mouth and the pain of Pietro's guilt in her heart, she pushed herself off of the wall and stepped into Nightcrawler's embrace.

"Close your eyes," he told her, and so she did, the sight of her brother's tear-stained face the last image in her head as she shut her eyes.

Her breath caught in her throat a second later, and she felt her stomach drop as she clung to Nightcrawler, afraid to open her eyes and see a blurred world around her. But he squeezed her arm a moment later and told her it was okay to open her eyes again. She waited a few seconds before peeking up at him, and he smiled at her before stepping away.