I’ve written one fic for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and I wrote it because the Scarlet Witch never got to use her cool mind powers in the Thanos movies. Why not? They made her into a walking energy weapon, which is generic. I wrote this piece to pour out her frustration and grief about the last life Thanos took before the Snap.
Wanda has used her powers against the Avengers. Their nightmares came to their minds in living immediacy, every touch, sight, smell believable while they watched their comrades die. All without Wanda swinging what anyone thinks of as a weapon.
Now she stands on the Avengers’ last battlefield. She can feel that, threaded through her experience, and her experience with illusion makes her very sure of her vision.
Wrong word. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong word.
Vision’s destruction is still an afterimage in Wanda’s sight. She knows intellectually that she died with the others when Thanos snapped the Gauntlet. That years passed, and the Avengers brought her and the others back. Time travel? Would it bring Vision back somewhere on this crazy battlefield, placed so neatly she could forget watching him die and die scant minutes ago? Or did he not make the list? He wasn’t just snapped, he was destroyed, his stone forcibly pulled from him. Oh, yes, the Avengers brought her back. The people fighting for their worlds on this battlefield will soon be reunited with their families, their friends, their loves…but not Vision.
She is near Thanos now. He has flung away the others. He is looking at her. She reaches out from several paces away and strikes him, hard.
She brings the Gauntlet back to his hands, so far as he can tell. She brings him to the moment he decomposed it, the moment of willing the Infinity Stones into nonexistence. But it’s different this time. Each stone is tied into his own life force. He won’t stop melting them. He can’t. And yet he feels his heartbeat fading, his life straining, as second upon irrevocable second ticks by…
He struggles. His will is horrifying. But she is back from the dead. And even through his resistance she feels his fear, his doubt, his pain through the surrender he can neither understand nor stop, like music in a scene she has orchestrated. She will play this song to the end.
And so she adds the last touch to break him, the final piece of helplessness while his essence dissipates with the dying stones. Let him know that someone who loves him is watching.
Thanos rears his head. The illusion shatters. She chose something too far from what he could imagine.
He looks at her. And for one, perfect moment, he is afraid.
The battlefield closes in in a wave of allies and Wanda returns to blunt abuse. Yes, she wants Thanos to die. But it was important first for him to understand.
Let that be his last vision.
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