Resilience | ✔

Chapter Eleven

Once again, Marley was unable to sleep.

It was midnight and she was wide awake. She was back in the guest room, Iron Bear clutched to her chest, the temperature adjusted (the result of a quick communicado with Friday) to be in the sixties, nice and chilly so she could have all the blankets on. She'd stopped texting with Beck and turned off the light at ten, and laid there as thoughts stormed in her head for two hours. Fears mostly, various forms of I am going to fuck this up.

Enough was enough. She sat up and grabbed her phone off the nightstand, using the flashlight to navigate across the room. She needed someone to talk to, someone she trusted, and Beck was probably asleep by now, so that left Steve. She wandered down the hall, hoping to find him in the kitchen, as that was the only place she really knew how to find from her room.

Steve wasn't there, but Wanda was, sitting at the island with a steaming mug in front of her, her chin propped in her hand. The expression on her face was one Marley knew well: so sad it bordered on desolate, too achingly grieving to even cry.

The expression washed off as she looked up, directly at Marley, like she'd heard her come in. "Hi," she said, with a soft smile.

"Hi," Marley said. And then, remembering all the times she'd wished someone would ask her, "Are you okay?"

"Of course," Wanda said.

"Only—you looked—" Marley stopped. You looked really sad didn't quite cut it. "You looked like you lost someone."

"Aren't you a keen observer of detail," Wanda said, pronouncing detail as d'tail, like it was an inside joke. "My twin brother. Pietro." She sighed. "You?"

"My mom." Marley hugged Iron Bear a little tighter.

"I'm sorry." She took a sip of her tea. "Steve's not here. He and Sam and Nat went out on a mission."

Marley tensed, frantically running back over the conversation. Had she made it all up, talking about people they'd lost, and she'd actually asked where Steve was? She wouldn't be surprised if she'd started hallucinating, given what the past few days had been like. Sometimes when she was peeing she felt like she could have been hallucinating the walk to the bathroom and was actually just peeing in front of a bunch of people. Maybe that had happened.

"You're not hallucinating," Wanda said. She tilted her head, and her irises looked red for a moment. "Superpowers, remember?"

Shit. Fuck. "You can read my mind?" Shit, everything she'd been thinking about Tony, everything she'd been thinking about how pretty Wanda was—shit—

"Not exactly," Wanda said, the corners of her mouth curling up. "People can accidentally project strong feelings or thoughts, and I hear them. I'm sorry, I thought someone had told you."

Marley laughed nervously, trying to cram her attraction to the other girl into a box in her head and never let it out again, at least not while she was in the room. "No, no one did."

"Well," Wanda said, "now you know."

"Do you have other superpowers?" Marley asked, before she could stop herself. "How does the mind reading—thought hearing, sorry—thing work?"

"I think Stark calls it 'neuro-electric interfacing,'" Wanda said. She stretched out a hand, and fiery crimson tendrils wreathed around her fingers before leaping out across the room and lifting one of Iron Bear's paws. "I call it telekinesis with some mental side effects."

Marley's jaw dropped. "Holy shit. That's—I—"

Wanda made a fist, and the red vanished. "It's a curse."