(no subject)

[ahollowman]

Tony waited outside of Wanda's apartment door, bag tucked under one arm, Ahab's cupholder in the other. He rang the buzzer, stared at his feet for a second, and then gave up and stood with his face an inch away from the peephole.

They'd barely talked recently, not after their little showdown on the beach on the fourth. But it couldn't last forever, couldn't be allowed to, really, and Tony knew that it was on him to try to make amends, as much as he could. Smooth things over.

He only hoped she'd give him the one more chance he knew he didn't deserve.

"Your neighbors are starting to think I'm creepy, please let me in."

Comments

[nothingmorehorrifying]

Wanda shuts the door without a word, but also does nothing to muffle the noise of the chain being undone. When she opens it again, Lucky sticks his head out and Wanda pulls him back by the collar to let Tony in. "It had better be a good sandwich."

Knowing Tony Stark, it probably is. She wonders if he'll actually remember what she does or doesn't like on hers.

[ahollowman]

Tony slipped in past Lucky, who gave his regular greeting of a soft bark and a nose on Tony's blue jeans. There wasn't a large hint that Wanda had been doing anything in particular before he arrived, which was a good sign. Interrupting her wouldn't have been a point in his favor.

He set the bag down on the coffee table, out of Lucky's reach, and the drinks. He'd picked up cold brew iced coffee for both of them. The sandwiches were removed -- they were good sandwiches, from a hole in the wall french and asian fusion place that he'd found and liked. Ciabatta loaves stuffed with sesame and soy marinated roast beef, topped with baby spinach, a mushroom croquette fresh out of the fryer, and a garlic chive aioli.

"Seriously, are you okay?" It was a genuine question, with genuine worry, although it did fall into the same pitfall it seemed Tony did by habit; putting too much importance on his own actions. As if his actions alone were enough to ruin Wanda's week.

[nothingmorehorrifying]

"Why wouldn't I be?" she asks. With a wave of her hand, the various envelopes of junk mail drift lazily off her table and land in a pile by the door to make room. A second later, her cat rises out of the chair where she'd been napping, casting Wanda a truly jaundiced look with one gold eye.

She isn't ready yet to admit that the food does look good.

"Are you...?" Wanda trails off, clearly debating as to whether or not she cares if Tony is okay.

[ahollowman]

Why wouldn't I be? is a blow to the ego, and whether she meant it intentionally or not, he certainly deserved it. Tony sighed and reached for one of the coffee cups before finding himself a seat perched at the very edge of the couch. As if in case the need came to flee the scene in a rush.

He watched the cat slink past to a quieter corner.

"No. But I'm never okay. Not okay is just my state of being and I accept that," Tony said, because what was the point of fighting it anymore. Nothing was ever going to be okay.

[nothingmorehorrifying]

"You're also blond," Wanda observed. It's the sort of streaky, highlighted look that seemed wildly in favor in America in the early 2000s and with teenage boys in Sokovia, circa now. It's not the worst look she's seen on him but it isn't the best either.

Rather than ignore the elephant in the room, she sighs and takes a seat across from Tony. "And how is Peter?"

[ahollowman]

"Yeah, that's. A thing. Not a mid-life crisis thing. A thing I need to talk to you about sometime when we're not about to eat probably."

Tony pulled a face before nursing his iced coffee for longer than necessary. Lucky was staring at the food in the center of the table, starting to drool.

"Peter's ... good. As good as a kid who just lost his only family and home and friends and school could be. He's actually surprisingly resilient."

Which was apparent to anyone, and talking circles around something else.

"I know, okay? I know. That I don't deserve to be able to parent brine shrimp let alone a teenager. I know I'm hot garbage juice and about as put together as Britney Spears with a pair of scissors. But who else, Wanda? Who else? It has to be better than nothing. I can at least make sure he gets the best education here possible."

[nothingmorehorrifying]

Wanda quietly notes, however, that Tony doesn't deny the existence of a midlife crisis. Just that the hair isn't an attendant side effect. She's prepared with a waspish remark to that effect when Tony starts to speak and then to ramble and then to crack. It's not an unfamiliar sight but it's one she usually sees directed at Steve or at the group.

It also takes her a second to piece together a reference to pop cultural moment that happened half a world away. When she was twelve.

She also can't deny anything Tony says, just sits there for a moment, thinking. She's surprised at her own sincerity when she finally does speak. "I know you don't think we're on the same team anymore. But I also don't know why you think it has to be you alone."

Not that Wanda thinks she ought to be the second name on the adoption form. The implications and age differences in both directions are simply alarming but the Avengers took her in didn't they?

[ahollowman]

Tony set his drink down on Wanda's table on one of the napkins from the bag and held his head in his fingers. Speaking like this was emotionally exhausting to him, even for short periods. Glibness was an easier defense mechanism.

There ought to be no real reason he should even feel compelled to be here, having this conversation. Without the team, who even were he and Wanda to each other? And beside that, Peter adored her, but who was he to Wanda, in the end? Tony shouldn't have to justify anything.

Should he?

Except that he and Wanda were something to one another.

There had always been some semblance of family in Fury's grand experiment. Small, and fucked up, and weird, but it was there. That was why it had hurt everyone so badly when Tony threw it on the ground and broke it.

"Then why does it feel like it?" he asked, with no hint of sarcasm or waspishness in his voice. It was an honest question, not an accusation.

"He just wants a dad. Every father figure that kid has ever had is dead and he just wants a dad. And I'm so tired of being terrified by that, because look how bad mine fucked the job up, and look how bad I fucked it up between all of us."

[nothingmorehorrifying]

Wanda has seen this side of Tony before. Truthfully, everyone at the Avengers compound had seen it more and more often in the months before the Sokovia Accords were put on the table. Something has been crumbling inside him for a long time. She knows that from taking a peek into his thoughts. The nightmare she'd concocted had been an easy thing to tie into the mind of someone already coming unraveled.

She's not proud of that.

"Well. I did scream you off a beach the last time we talked." It's the closest she'll come to taking back her words. There are a lot of old wounds between them that have nothing to do with Peter Parker. It's just that that conversation had picked the scabs.

Leaning back in her seat, Wanda tries to choose her words carefully. Her temper has never been as bad as her brother's but she knows how to find the soft spots and jab them verbally. Stalling for time, she takes a bite of her food and then has to close her eyes because, damn, it actually is a good sandwich.

"I don't want–" No. That's not it, not exactly. "I am tired of hating you. It hasn't fixed anything. I think, when I first came to America and we were all trying, things were better?" Not necessarily happy or perfect and she's never going to let go of the fact that he put a crucifix in her room, but they'd been better.

[ahollowman]

Sometimes I'm tired of being me, Tony didn't say.

"Things were better," he agreed, because that, again, was apparent to anyone observing and Tony knew it. And they had been better. They were at least able to socialize, politely, to get work done, even joke now and then. And that had been true of everyone at the New Avengers Compound. Even when Tony was difficult or abrasive, which was usually, there'd been an undercurrent of mutual respect all around.

So what changed?

"Yeah. But why?" He sagged back against Wanda's sofa. "What are the variables?"

[nothingmorehorrifying]

"The Accords were the variable," Wanda supposes. Quickly, she waves a hand to stave off any argument. They will never agree about that; she wasn't even given the time to form an opinion before her actions were decided for her. What came after almost doesn't matter.

"Then the Raft." Wanda leans back in her chair, the crown of her head touching the wall. "Or maybe it all started with me playing with minds like toys." Maybe it's just fate. Maybe all the good she's trying to do now simply pales in comparison to her past.

Sometimes, no matter what Steve says, she thinks that these things are all her fault. Not just Lagos, but everything going back to that castle.

[ahollowman]

Tony wasn't about to make it an argument. Not anymore. Something had shifted in his beliefs, something that started with harsh words from Clint, a fuzzy camera feed of Wanda, tied up and muzzled like an animal. Doubts that started to bleed out into all of his thoughts like dirty laundry.

He rubbed at his mouth with one hand.

"You make a fool of me, Wanda." The words weren't an accusation.

"I thought I was doing the right thing. I believed I was. Now I'm not sure I can trust anything I believe. And then you, the whole deal with Peter. I get angry. I want to defend myself. Because it's one big reminder that I can't trust myself. You make a fool of me."

[nothingmorehorrifying]

Wanda nods, face pressed into the palm of her hand. "There is one thing I will never accuse you of," she says. "And that is having bad intentions." Even she knows that the last eight years of Tony Stark's life have been about trying to make things right. It's just that he has no idea the scope and effect of everything his work has done, how deep and insidious the world can be.

And if his mind is anything like the one she looked into those years ago, sometimes Tony doesn't know the difference between saving the world and ending it. Maybe she doesn't either.

"I'm not good at forgiving," she says. "There are things I have held onto for a long time now, since I was ten years old. When I was angry about Peter, it wasn't just about Peter." Wanda shifts position, leaning heavily into the table with her elbows.

"Did I ever tell you what happened, exactly?"

[ahollowman]

Tony wasn't good at forgiving, either. But he'd been getting better at the process of trying. He turned his head to look at Wanda with curious expectancy. He wasn't certain what she had to say, but under the circumstances, he was willing to listen.

There were times when a person better needed to listen than speak. He'd also been getting better at the process of determining that.

So he didn't speak. He unwrapped his sandwich and shoved Lucky slightly to the side with his foot.

"No?"

[nothingmorehorrifying]

"When we were ten. Someone was at war with someone else. Even that young, you learn not to care who. They offload their bombs on Sokovia all the same," she says. Wanda makes herself look Tony in the eye. It has nothing to do with confrontation and everything to do with keeping her eyes open so that she doesn't have to relive the memory.

"We were ten, eating dinner with our parents. A shell exploded in our apartment. Pietro grabs me and we roll under the bed in time for a second shell to land. It doesn't go off." The last time she spoke words like this, she realizes, were to Ultron.

"Every effort to get us out, every bump, I think this is it. This is what will kill us. For two days, all we could do was stare at your name."

[ahollowman]

There'd been a time when Tony, having had his fill of the public arguing that he was going soft and liberal, and that he was trying to sweep his war profiteering under the carpet, between the people decrying him both a national hero and a threat to national security, between Steve and Thunderbolt and a rock and a hard place, that Tony might have wanted to argue that it wasn't just his name, that it was a company, one he'd never started, only slotted into his place in.

But that part had died with the photo of a boy he kept in his wallet and the death of half the universe. The guilt was on his shoulders. Ignorance wasn't and had never been an excuse. And yet.

"Wanda. Wanda I didn't know. I didn't know Obie was double dealing. Christ, that's a war crime. You have to believe that I never knew. If I had, I would have done something. Before it was too late."

Tony held a hand over his eyes for a moment and took a breath. He was making it about himself again. He was filled with anger and loss and a sort of hurt he'd never recovered from, and kept inflicting on the people around him.

"I'm sorry. It doesn't matter. It doesn't change anything. You just want me to know. Now I know."

The knowledge was a burden, but one he'd been meant to bear for too long and hadn't.

[nothingmorehorrifying]

"Why would you have known?" Wanda says, proud of herself for the steady tone of her voice. Last time, she'd had anger to smother up the grief. Now she just has the quiet of the apartment, broken up by a dog resting his head on her thigh and whining in concern. Absently, she scratches his ears. The question is neither condemnation nor absolution, just the statement of a sad fact. Her country has been everyone's dumping ground and captive.

"It doesn't matter if the weapons were sold legally or illegally, they exploded just the same. And sometimes, we argue and I look at you and I forget how big a company is. It's just you."

Breathing out, Wanda can't keep eye contact anymore. She drops her head down into her hand, pressing firmly against her eyes because she will not, cannot cry. Tony had anger and loss and it made him volatile. She's not much different.

"It's not as though you were the one who came into our apartment. It was just one of your products. It was made, it was sold, and some warlord dropped it. But for ten years it was easier to remember that one name."

The truth was that Tony Stark had been part of the machine of war, an important part like an engine, but still just one part of an intricate and messy series of links. "Sometimes, I get angry at you over things happening now and it mixes together. It's not fair." Not to either of them.

[ahollowman]

Tony lolled his head to the side. It hadn't even been a long conversation, but it felt like there was a vampire in the room with them, sucking everything out. Maybe there always had been, and he'd been too afraid to peek behind the curtain.

His chest felt tight and his eyes felt hot.

"That's just it." The tone of his voice was firm, but too emotional. He recognized it, from a board room, occupied by only himself and Steve Rogers. Captain Fucking America. Tony never spoke it out loud, like a curse, but he felt it -- that somewhere along the line, the public had its names mixed up. Whose face represented America at its best in the new century? It was Tony Stark, smirking and glittering and denying culpability because it was just one of his products, fallen into the wrong hands. It wasn't an apartment building ripped apart, it was a rounding error, a Tuesday.

"Just another product. And when my eyes were finally forced open I thought I was going to fix the problem. I really did."

It was Obie's voice, strangely, that haunted him then. It was a frustrated, little poison dart spoken about Wanda in the heat of an argument.

"I tried to rid the world of weapons. All I did was create its best one yet."

He wasn't talking about the suit. Because Tony Stark was the suit.

[nothingmorehorrifying]

It probably wouldn't have helped Tony to know that Wanda feels just as drained. Somehow, in three years, they've managed to avoid this conversation. It had been enough for Tony to know what she and Pietro had, nebulously, been collateral damage to his ignorance. The details only make it worse for both of them.

Before they met, before Ultron, Wanda had sometimes fantasized about the day she would meet Tony Stark and confront him with this, tell him it was all his fault. Now the day has come and it feels hollow, pyrrhic. Watching him squirm with all the weight of guilt brings her no satisfaction.

"You are one man," she says. "All the money and power in the world doesn't change that there are six billion other people." That means a lot of people without hope, a lot of warlords, and only one Iron Man. Only one Scarlet Witch. Tony Stark knows about resource management, after all. He must know it's unsustainable.

She isn't sure if it's ironic or appropriate for a Jewish woman to call Stark out on his messianic complex.

[ahollowman]

Tony knew. He knew that the entire premise was unsustainable. Wasn't that what Ultron had been meant to solve? A suit of armor that was everywhere at once, could have countless copies and objectives. But there were pieces missing there too.

He stood up, because his foot had begun bouncing on the floor.

"I know. Finally. I get it. That there's no way to just fix things, once and for all. But it's ... "

He shook his head, eyes going blank of emotion, gaze staring straight through Wanda at something else, distant as a foreign star.

"I care about you. God, I care about all of you, so much. So if you want to know what made my feet finally bring me here to honestly try to hear you out. It's because the city let me see it. That vision, Wanda? That nightmare? You're more than you think. Because it's real, and it's not coming anymore. It's found us. And I lost. I can't save anything."

He wiped his mouth with his palm.

"Except maybe with you. With Peter. Maybe my own soul. Maybe that was the one thing I had to do in the first place."

[nothingmorehorrifying]

That, of all things, startles Wanda and she lets it show on her face. Hypothetically, she'd known he didn't hate her and might even have said that Tony cared but it's still something else to hear it said out loud. It comes out fast and honest and the pain in his face, for all its familiarity, is impossible to understand in relation to her.

And just as quickly, it burned out and left him ashen.

"What do you mean it found us?" The last time they'd talked about this, they'd come from relatively the same time. Darrow has offered her no strange premonitions and insights into someone's mind. Tony speaks like he's seen something terrible.

[ahollowman]

"This place dumped it in my head."

There was no need to further explain that. They'd both been around long enough in the city to realize that those things happened. Was it the truth that got revealed? Even if the evidence didn't point to yes, Tony wasn't prepared to go down the rabbit hole of just what truth even was.

He'd seen too much of the stones at work for that.

"It's the end game. I saw things. I mean, you've seen it too."

In his head, in his moment of weakness.

"Thanos came. The fuckstick who sent Loki and the Chitauri? He's after the stones. He needs all of them. The Tesseract was one. Vision has another. Stephen Strange has a third. If he gets all of them, it's the end. And I don't mean it's sad that I couldn't win the day for everyone and get us some good press for once, I mean. The end. Biblical. Half the universe murdered in a snap of his fingers."

He must have looked like Bruce just then, giving the warning, pale and desperate. Except that it was too little, too late for warnings.

"But he did it. We lost. Everyone's gone."

[nothingmorehorrifying]

There's a moment where the words simply don't register and she almost wants to claim it's a failing of her English. But no. It's that what Tony is trying to tell her is just unimaginable, overwhelming, terrifying. Half the universe. Not just a country or a planet. Not even a galaxy. Half of all life that ever was. That could mean her. That could mean Steve or Thor or Vision. The more the implications reach her, the harder it is for Wanda to breathe.

And Tony has memories of living it and now he's here. The conflict of twelve people on an airport tarmac suddenly seems like such a pointless divide.

"The mind stone," she says, voice constricting. "The thing that keeps Vision going. That made me...like this." She and Pietro experienced only some of its power, overwhelming and terrifying. That there are more stones like this and someone who can use them...

"What do we do. Here."

[ahollowman]

Tony can see it. The very moment that Wanda realizes the stakes. Realizes what's been different about Tony Stark lately, what brought him up to her doorstep and kept him there through the conversation.

His expression grows pained. He looks away for a moment, regretting that he'd told her at all. It felt like a black cloud, spreading from person to person every time the knowledge got passed on to another soul. A curse.

"The mind stone, with Vision, the thing that gave you your abilities. Time, with Strange. The Tesseract was space. Power. Reality. Soul. He's got all of them."

He pressed his lips together, before smiling in a way that didn't come from happiness.

"What do we do? Don't waste your time. Hug your brother. Go to a synagogue."

[nothingmorehorrifying]

His smile isn't a smile. It's more like how mammals bare they're teeth when they feel threatened and humans misinterpret it. It's ghastly and yet Wanda still doesn't think she can comprehend it. A darkly curious part of her wants to reach out and look into his thoughts and see what Tony's seen except that she's sworn never to use her powers like that again. Definitely not on Tony.

He'll probably never let her come near him with a red touch ever again.

"And what about us?" she asks. Tony just said it himself, he cares about her. They don't agree on many things and he's as occasionally thoughtless as she is spiteful, but they were also something to one another. Something bordering on friends.

[ahollowman]

His face was calm again as he looked at her with consideration, before sitting on the arm of her sofa. He folded his hands together and pinned them between his knees, like he didn't know what else to do with them.

Lucky whined softly.

"If this is the only chance I get to spend time with you, I don't want to waste that, either. It's the only way to stop being your American nightmare. The only way I can possibly make up for what happened in Sokovia, and I don't mean with Ultron. It's to give a shit. To know you're a person and that everything I do or don't do makes ... ripples."

[nothingmorehorrifying]

It's strange. Sitting where he does makes Tony taller than her, leaning down so he can speak, but there's something very small about him in this moment. As if he's suddenly seeing just how small he is in the universe and it terrifies him. It echoes around her thoughts too.

"You're not a nightmare," she says. Wanda doesn't say much after that, instead thinking about what words to use, how to say what she feels. "But sometimes I think I'm yours. And you wouldn't be the only one."

So many talking heads on the news have asked, again and again, what right she has to even exist after all.

"I believe that your intentions have always been good," she says again. "I truly do think that."

[ahollowman]

"You're not my nightmare, Wanda," Tony said, sounding grave-tired. He'd met his nightmare. Whatever anxiety he had there, whatever dread he was holding in his heart were laid to rest. Everything he feared was both bigger and smaller than he'd imagined.

He rubbed the tip of his nose with the back of his wrist.

"I'm not afraid of you."

Though he had been.

"I used to think that I could do more than just bust a bunch of terrorists. That I just kept putting a band-aid on a bullet wound. But now I wonder if that's not the realest good I ever did, everything up until New York."

[nothingmorehorrifying]

Tony has always been an emotional person. For all of his business acumen and his scientific focus, he's ruled by passion and emotion. Wanda's known that since she took a turn in his head. But she doesn't think she's ever seen him close to tears, which is alarming in a new way. She has never been one to comfort and she's guiltily relieved when Lucky puts his head up on Tony's thigh, blinking his one good eye up at him.

"There's not much we can do in Darrow, is there?" They can train and invent but if what Tony says is true, too much has already come to pass if they go back. It's frustrating, not being able to do anything. It also means she has a little time to decide how things are going to be here, between them, between the others.

"I guess the first thing to do is finish the sandwiches." Or wrap them up. She's not very hungry right now.

[ahollowman]

"There's not. Not until I get the word otherwise from Strange."

He reached out to rub the tips of Lucky's soft ears between his forefinger and thumb, stroking little circles. Tony wondered, not for the first time, why dog ears were so soft.

His laugh was soft and singular when it came.

"You should probably keep the sandwiches," he said. It was a very Tony thing to say. "But you can't have my coffee."

He looked over at Wanda, features shuffling through micro-expressions before settling on concern.

"Am I gonna start another argument if I ask you not to tell the kid yet?"

[nothingmorehorrifying]

"They're good sandwiches," she admits. The changes in his face are minute but make him indecipherable and it leaves her feeling disoriented. A second ago, Wanda could read everything on his face, now it's too quick. Nothing seems to settle, either on his expression and in her own thoughts.

"I'm too busy trying to understand it all to argue with you." Peter will probably have to know and sooner than later. Keeping Wanda in the dark had only made her angry at Tony and she can't imagine that Peter will take kindly to it either but he's so new to this place. "Not yet."

[ahollowman]

Tony nodded.

"But soon. It's."

He didn't even know what made him understand that Peter needed to know eventually, but there it was. If Tony Stark had to be the bearer of bad news, the reaper's envoy, well. That was just part of his lot. They all needed to be informed.

"What is it you said? It's not my job to do it alone, something like that?"

Csirke had come back out of hiding with the drop in tension, and he rubbed his hands through the dog's fried chicken coat with a 'good boy,' smiling.

"Thank you for carrying part of the weight."

A man couldn't be a pallbearer on his own.

[nothingmorehorrifying]

"Soon," Wanda agrees. They all know the burden of secrets left to fester. Everything about this conversation has been an awkward testament to that fact.

When Csirke comes out of hiding, Wanda pats her thigh and makes a kissing noise. The dog wags his fluffy tail and happily jumps up on the couch, immediately wedging himself between the place where Wanda sits and the arm that Tony's perched on. At least someone here doesn't worry about the tension.

"I'm going to tell Pietro." She assumes it's a given but maybe she also needs to say some things out loud.

[ahollowman]

Tony rocked his head back and gave a long, soft groan. He trusted Wanda's discretion, almost implicitly. But her brother, Tony knew him far less, and what he did know of the kid was mostly that he didn't always think before speaking. Or acting.

But it wasn't Tony's decision. As much as that pained him, it really wasn't. Not only because Wanda was her own person, but because he couldn't argue against Wandatalking with her brother about what Tony had just revealed to her.

That she wouldn't live a very long life. Unless something changed. Unless Tony did something drastic.

"Alright. Alright. But if he talks to Pete before I get a chance to I'm gonna slap him. Not even a superhero fight. Just a backhand."

[nothingmorehorrifying]

"If my brother goes blabbing things I tell him in secret, I'll be slapping him first," Wanda says. Given that they're siblings, she has no problem using the necessary amount of force. Not that she's actually too worried. Her brother is an energetic loudmouth, but he and Wanda have had things they play close to the chest before. It comes with the territory of rough streets and difficult lives.

It's odd how easy it is for her brain to compartmentalize away the potential of her own death. Focusing on what Tony is saying, thinking about what she needs to do or say, they keep her calm. Maybe it's because she's faced death before, looked Ultron in his eye circuits and said that when she felt Pietro die, she had too.

"Thank you," she says. Wanda's not sure what it is she's thanking him for. Apologizing? Trusting her? They feel a little fragile to say out loud. "For coming over."

[ahollowman]

"Any time," Tony managed to say with a smile that was both genuine and relieved, shedding the bone-deep tiredness of the conversation before. There were too few people Tony could ever hope to speak to about some things, not if he wanted even an ounce of true understanding. Wanda was one, and if he alienated her one day, finally and permanently, his life would be all the poorer for it.

And it would be his own fault.

"I always like an excuse to buy sandwiches and have Lucky burp in my face. You take care of yourself. Not that ypu don't always. And take care of your brother."