Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"God, this traffic. You’d think New York would’ve figured it out by now.”
His voice carried a laugh, not frustration. Bumper to bumper, horns blaring. Typical New York—chaotic, unpredictable. No one ever really knew what they were doing.

“Wishful thinking, babe,” she said, reaching into the back seat to retrieve the Captain America plush their toddler had tossed mid-giggle fit. “I don’t think she even likes this thing, Grant. Keeps throwing it.”

“What?! Of course she loves it! It’s Captain America!” he gasped in mock outrage, one hand to his chest, the other steady on the wheel.

Truthfully, it might’ve been him who loved the thing. But really—who didn’t love Cap? Recently unfrozen from the ice, it was the stuff of science fiction. A living legend in the year 2012. Super soldiers, Stark’s latest tech—it was shaping up to be a futuristic golden age. And it was only May. What a time to be alive.

The traffic came to a complete halt. Not unusual, and not unwelcome. They weren’t in a rush. They’d already shopped the biggest stores, glimpsed a few celebrities. The trip had been everything they’d hoped for—even if their two-year-old had thrown a Category 5 meltdown leaving Toys-R-Us. That was where Grant had found the plush, wide-eyed at the display like a kid himself. Claire, busy wrangling their waddling daughter, hadn’t stood a chance against his puppy-dog plea.

So the Captain America plush came home with them. Officially for their daughter. Of course.

A blue boot stepped on something soft buried in the rubble—a toy. A small shield dangled from it by a fraying string, crushed beneath the tread. The red and blue were caked in ash, the white lost entirely to soot. Unrecognizable.

Steve didn’t notice. He thought it was a rock and kept running, stopping short in front of a crushed yellow taxi.

“You sure about this?” he asked, lifting his shield, planting his feet.

“Yeah,” came the answer—casual, almost amused. “It’s gonna be fun.”

She wore black boots with a slight heel. She ran toward him, then vanished—launched into the sky. A flash, a blur. It would’ve been something to see.

But the toddler in the rubble didn’t see that.

She saw boots crush her toy. The one from the store. The one Daddy bought. She remembered the giraffe mascot walking through the aisles, waving. Remembered Mama lifting her high, her baby giggles echoing off the shelves. It had been bright, loud, fun.

Now, her Captain America plush lay crumpled in dust.

“ Mama… ” she babbled, crawling under splintered beams and broken bricks. The space was barely large enough—but she was small. Small enough to squeeze through, to follow the dim, familiar warmth ahead.

More rubble. The whole street was rubble. But the girl didn’t care about that.

She cared about her toy. And her mama.

“ Mama… ” she said again, voice soft as she curled into the arms of the woman lying still beneath broken concrete.

Mama was being silly. Lying on rocks like they were a bed. With more rocks covering her legs like a blanket. Silly Mama.

The toddler pulled her mother’s arm over her and snuggled close. Both of them were coated in ash, features blurred by dust and debris. Unrecognizable.

Just like the body three feet away.

He’d saved them. Thrown himself from the car the moment chaos erupted—just like every other parent trying to outrun death falling from the sky. He’d yelled for them to follow. Shoved them away, out of the path of the flung vehicle.

It hit him dead-on. Quick. Brutal. Final.

He lay crushed beneath it now.

Like a boot on a plush toy.

Unrecognizable.

The dust floated like snow. Soft, quiet. It settled on her eyelashes, on her mother’s still face. The toddler blinked up at the gray sky, where earlier there had been sounds—loud ones. Crashes and growls and screaming. But now it was quiet again.

She liked the quiet.

She pressed her cheek to Mama’s chest. It didn’t rise and fall. But her little mind didn’t notice. Or maybe it did, in a way too young to understand. She just thought Mama was sleepy. That Mama needed rest after the giraffe store and the car ride and the loud noises.

So she stayed.

A breeze stirred the ash. Somewhere distant, a siren howled, but it didn’t come near. There were too many bodies. Too much debris. The block was rubble—concrete and steel mangled into something unwalkable, unseeable.

So no one saw her.

No one saw the girl curled up beside her mother in the crook of a collapsed building. No one saw the shield-shaped toy half-buried by dust. No one saw the tiny hand curled around stiff, lifeless fingers.

“Mama?”

It was a question this time, not a babble. The first seed of something that might, someday, become grief. A pause. A shift. She looked up, squinting. Her mother’s mouth was open, lips parted as if caught mid-word. Her hair was fanned over cracked pavement, matted with blood the toddler didn’t notice.

“Mama?” she whispered again, voice thinner.

She nestled closer, her breath warming the skin of a body already cooling. She didn't understand why Mama didn’t hug her back. Didn’t sing. Didn’t move.

But she was patient.

She would wait.

Just like Mama had waited for her when she took too long in the toy aisle. Just like Daddy had waited by the car, leaning against the door, watching them with a smile.

She would wait.

Her fingers tightened on the plush as her eyes began to droop, the exhaustion finally catching her. The blanket of dust grew heavier. Gray coated her curls, her cheeks, her lashes. The soft thud of distant helicopters and the low rumble of collapsing buildings blurred into a lullaby.

Somewhere, far above, a god fell from the sky. Iron armor streaked overhead. Something exploded.

But the girl didn’t stir.

She was warm beside Mama. And in her tiny world, that was all that mattered.

Chapter Text

She was seven now.

Not a baby, not really a little kid anymore—not by the orphanage’s standards. The younger ones got the softer voices, the extra apple slices, the reassurances. She got told to act her age. Wipe her tears. Make her bed without help. Seven wasn’t small. Seven meant growing up.

She hated seven.

Seven meant too many questions with not enough answers. Seven meant picture day, and field trips, and therapists who smiled too much and said things like “Do you remember your parents?” in voices so gentle it made her feel sick.

She didn’t answer them. Not really. Not truthfully.

Because yes, she remembered. Not like pictures. Not like movies. More like dreams. Like pieces of a song she once knew and forgot the lyrics to.

She remembered a giraffe.

She remembered a stuffed toy—red and blue and white, though the white was mostly gray now, hidden in a drawer beneath her bed. She never played with it, but she never threw it away. She remembered a laugh. Her father’s, maybe. And her mother’s arms wrapped around her like a blanket, the warmth of her voice humming somewhere near her ear.

She remembered dust. So much dust.

But most of all—she remembered the sound. That terrible, terrible sound. The air splitting. Something massive and wrong screaming from the sky. And then—crack. Crash. Light brighter than the sun. A world broken open like a glass bowl falling off a counter.

Then it was rubble. Everywhere.

And after that… nothing.

When the police found her, her little body was curled around her mother’s hand, still holding tight. They had to pry her fingers off.

They told her she’d been there for over twelve hours. Alive. Waiting.

Now she sat cross-legged on the orphanage cot, in a room she shared with two other girls who didn’t talk to her much. The window was cracked open. A breeze lifted the frayed curtains, and outside, she could hear the buzz of the city.

New York. Still the same city. Still noisy. Still fast. Still pretending it had a heart.

She pulled the toy from under her bed, slowly. The Captain America plush was mangled, one of its button eyes missing, a deep tear across the chest that exposed stuffing like guts. She looked at it with hollow eyes.

Captain America. Steve Rogers. The great hero.

They taught about him at school. The man out of time. The savior of New York. The one who helped save the world from an alien invasion.

The one who stepped on my toy.

That part wasn’t in the textbooks.

The one who ran past her without seeing her. Who smashed through buildings. Who threw a shield that ricocheted off a taxi that collapsed on her father.

Not the aliens. Not the monsters. Not Loki.

The Avengers.

That was the name whispered in reverence by teachers and reporters and wide-eyed children on the playground. Superheroes. Earth's Mightiest Heroes.

She clenched the plush in her fists.

"Heroes," she whispered, voice thick with something dark.

She didn't understand the politics of it. The press conferences. The damage control. She didn’t care that the city had supposedly been saved. She only knew her parents hadn’t been. They had been smiling. Breathing. Laughing. Just hours before it happened.

And now they were gone.

And the people who caused it—the ones who brought the fight to the city, who threw explosions around like they were water balloons—got statues. Got parades. Got thanks.

She remembered the first time she'd seen Iron Man on TV. It was in the orphanage rec room, where all the kids sat cross-legged in front of the screen while Tony Stark gave some speech, making everyone laugh.

She hadn’t laughed.

She had screamed.

Loud and raw and awful. She didn’t even know why at first—just that something inside her cracked open. The adults rushed her out, and she cried so hard she threw up. After that, they said no more superhero movies for her. Said she was sensitive. Said she needed space.

She didn't want space. She wanted them to understand.

They didn’t.

In the quietest moments, when the other girls were asleep and the world felt still, she lay awake thinking about the day it all happened.

Sometimes, she pictured what it would have been like if they had stayed in the hotel. If her dad hadn’t wanted to stop at the toy store. If her mom hadn’t said yes to one more walk before heading back.

What if they’d been five minutes later? Or earlier? What if they’d stayed on a different street? What if the Avengers hadn’t landed right there, hadn’t turned their battle into a war zone?

The thoughts curled around her like smoke, choking her.

In the corners of her mind, the dream-memories played on repeat: Mama lying still, covered in ash. Daddy never moving again. Her tiny voice calling “Mama?” in the dark, over and over.

No one had answered.

But now she had answers of her own.

She wasn’t stupid. She’d pieced it together over the years. Whispered words. Headlines. Old news clips she snuck on the library computers. The Battle of New York. Alien invasion. Massive destruction. Civilian casualties.

Collateral damage.

That’s what they called her parents. That’s what they called her.

Collateral.

She hated that word. It made her feel like an afterthought. Like someone had stepped on her whole life and kept walking.

Like a boot on a toy.

Someday, she told herself, they’ll hear me.

She didn’t know how. She didn’t know when. But someday, someone would listen. Someday, someone would look at the statues and the tributes and realize that not everyone saw the Avengers as heroes.

Not everyone got saved.

Some of them got left behind in the rubble.

And some of them were still there, even now.

She pulled the toy close again, curling under the thin blanket, eyes fixed on the moonlit window.

She was seven.

Not small anymore.

Not afraid.

Just angry.

And heartbreakingly alone.

Chapter Text

She was twelve now.

There wasn’t much left in her of the toddler who once giggled in toy aisles, sticky hands clinging to a Captain America plush like he could save her from anything. That girl had been buried with her mother beneath concrete and ash. The one who remained had eyes too old for her age, a constant pressure behind her sternum that never let her breathe right, and a low, feral tension in her jaw that made teachers flinch when she answered too quickly in class.

They told her she was resilient.
They praised her for surviving.
But surviving didn’t feel like winning. It didn’t feel like strength.

It felt like rotting inside your own body and pretending it didn’t smell.

She didn’t sleep through the night. Not really. Some mornings she’d wake up in a cold sweat, arms crossed over her chest like a coffin lid. Other times she’d wake screaming into her pillow, raw-throated and gasping for someone who wasn’t there. No one ever came running. She learned to make the screams silent.

The nightmares weren’t always linear. Sometimes she was back in the rubble, her lungs caving in with dust, crying for her mama who wouldn’t move. Other times, the dreams were worse—twisted parodies of memory, like being stuck in the toy store again, bright and colorful, with her parents laughing and holding hands. And then, without warning, Iron Man would burst through the ceiling and everything would come down like dominoes. Her mother wouldn’t be able to scream. Her father would melt into the pavement. And Captain America’s plastic smile would be the last thing she saw before waking up choking on air that wasn’t filled with smoke.

She never talked about those dreams. Not to therapists. Not to social workers. Not to the string of foster parents who meant well but didn’t want to hear about bloodstains on baby clothes and the feel of a mother’s arm going stiff in your grip.

The system called her aggressive. Prone to violent outbursts. But what else was she supposed to be?

They had handed her a trauma too big for her bones and expected her to carry it politely.

By the time 2022 and her twelfth birthday came around, she’d already been through just as many homes.

Each time, it ended the same.

A fight.
A police report.

A quiet voice in the hallway saying, “She’s not the right fit for our family.”

This time, it had been over some stupid school project. “Hero Day,” they called it. She was supposed to pick an Avenger and explain how they had helped save the world. As if the world they saved had ever wanted her in it.

She chose not to participate. Sat in the back, arms crossed, trying not to look at the wall of red and gold and stars and hammers. Trying not to hear the buzz of adoration from classmates talking about how cool it was when Hulk smashed buildings and Thor called down lightning from the sky.

But then a boy stood up, proudly wearing a glitter-covered Iron Man mask he made with his mom. He started acting out the Battle of Sokovia in front of the class. Pretending to blast robots. Pretending to fly.

He laughed when he said the buildings fell. Laughed.

And that was it.

She was on him before anyone could react—shoving him to the ground, fists pounding against his jaw, his mask crushed under her foot. She didn’t even hear the screams at first. Didn’t feel the hands pulling her off. Didn’t realize her knuckles were bleeding until they locked her in the principal’s office and called her a danger to others.

She didn’t cry.

Not then.
Not later.
She just stared at the Iron Man mask on the floor, cracked down the middle, and wished it was the real one.

The new home was nicer. Sterile. Government-subsidized. Clean lines and muted colors. A family with a son in college, gone most of the year, and a dad who worked in cybersecurity—something boring and official that meant he was always typing late at night in his office with the door closed.

The foster mother tried. Really. She made pancakes on Sundays. She asked about school. But her voice was always a little too cheerful, like she was trying to be heard over something that was howling underneath. Like she could sense the grenade ticking in her house and didn’t know how to disarm it.

No one did.

Because it wasn’t just the rage. It wasn’t just the silence.
It was the emptiness.

The fact that she had nothing. No photos. No keepsakes. Not even a grave. Her parents' bodies had never been recovered. Too much destruction. Too much chaos. Just names on a list of the dead from New York, lumped in with hundreds of others.
Collateral damage.

That’s what they called them.

Not “victims.”
Not “family.”
Just two people in the way when the so-called heroes burst through the city like gods with hammers.

The world had moved on. Marvelled at the superheroes. Built statues in their honor.
But no one remembered the people who died quietly.
No one remembered a little girl curled up beside her dead mother in the dark.

Except her.

It started with curiosity. A late night. A light under the office door.

She crept downstairs in bare feet, her breath held tight in her chest. Her foster father’s computer was still on, the screen still lit. He’d left for a weekend conference. The system was unlocked.

She sat in his chair like a thief, heart pounding, and began to dig.

She didn’t know what she was looking for, not exactly. Just… something. Proof. Answers.
Maybe a reason.

What she found was the internet. The real one. The deep parts. The places people don’t talk about.

One site led to another. Links hidden in plain sight. Blogs with no authors. Forums with no names.

There, she found people like her. Angry. Disillusioned. Hurt.
Not shouting with torches—but whispering with facts. With truths.

The Avengers hadn’t saved New York.
They had destroyed half of it.
They hadn’t prevented Sokovia from falling.
They let it fall.

Stark created Ultron.
Wanda Maximoff lost control in Lagos.
And the bodies piled up in their wake.

Someone calling themselves Ravager01 reached out to her after she commented on a thread titled “We Didn’t Ask for Heroes.” She didn’t say much. Just that she had lived through it. That her parents hadn’t. That no one ever cared to ask her side of the story.

He responded:
“You’re not alone. They want you to believe you are, but you’re not. We’re building something. Something better.”

His words were careful. Thoughtful. Not aggressive. Not wild. They sounded like comfort. Like a lullaby.

He told her that her anger was justified. That it wasn’t her fault. That the world had wronged her. That it was time someone started fighting back.

And for the first time in her life, she felt like someone was finally listening.
Not trying to fix her. Not trying to contain her.

Just listening.

The next morning, she was quiet at breakfast. Her foster mom asked how she slept. She said “fine.” No one noticed the bruises on her arms were fading slower than they used to. No one noticed the look in her eyes had changed—less stormy, more still.

Like a sea just before the tsunami.

Because something had cracked open inside her. And behind it wasn’t grief.

It was purpose.

And all she needed now… was a little more time.

Chapter Text

The day was quiet.

That kind of quiet that didn’t used to exist in their world — not before Thanos, not before Sokovia, not before New York. It was a late spring morning, sun slanting lazily across the floor of the compound as if even light itself had grown comfortable. Wanda sat curled in the oversized armchair in the corner of the rec room, a book in hand but eyes far away, flicking every so often toward the window. There was peace now, or at least the illusion of it. The world had healed in patches, still bandaged with legislation and trauma therapy and educational reform, but it had healed. Mostly.

She could feel the minds around her, calm and flickering with low-level thoughts — Tony muttering to himself in a lab even though he wasn’t supposed to be working today, Bruce meditating somewhere in the courtyard, Sam and Carol arguing playfully over breakfast. There was no threat. No dread crawling at the edges of her skin.

Until the alarms came alive.

The compound’s sleek design didn’t allow for sirens or blinking lights — just an immediate, mechanical snap of the intercom system taking over the room, and then Fury’s voice, iron and sand and urgency.

“All hands. Now. Meeting room. Top level. Bring whoever’s in reach.”

Wanda straightened, the chill slicing into her stomach before she even registered the words. She knew that tone. Everyone knew that tone. The last time he’d used it, they'd lost friends. She left the book on the chair, spine cracked and forgotten, and walked toward the briefing room like she was going to war.

By the time she arrived, the others were gathering — Steve by the table already, Bucky sliding in beside him. Natasha, silent and coiled like she already smelled blood in the air. The younger recruits hovered at the back, tense but unknowing. Fury stood at the head, arms crossed over his chest, the digital display behind him flickering with data streams and maps that meant nothing yet.

“This isn’t a drill,” he said. “And this isn’t a clean-up mission.”

The screens changed, pulling up what at first looked like ordinary satellite photos — scorched ground, a collapsed building, charred trees. But as the images zoomed in, the truth revealed itself. The structure wasn’t destroyed from an external explosion. It had imploded, violently. Walls curled inward like paper in flame. Glass had turned to dust. Bodies — outlines only, no names yet — littered the space. Dozens.

“This was a private facility, off-grid. Set up beneath the radar about three years ago. Took us that long to even confirm it existed, let alone find it. The paper trail was buried behind layers of proxies and dead-end shell accounts. No corporate logos. No formal government ties. But they were organized. Precise. Every step intentional.”

He paused. Let that hang.

“They were experimenting on people. And not in the 'mad scientist with a god complex' way we’ve seen before. This was personal. Focused.”

Wanda leaned forward slightly, her brow tightening. “On what?”

“Revenge,” Fury said simply. “Against us.”

The air shifted.

He clicked a remote. Another image came up — a dark web forum screenshot, blurry but readable. Red-and-black graphics. A post header in screaming capslock: "THEY CALL THEMSELVES HEROES. WE CALL THEM WHAT THEY ARE: BUTCHERS."

It went on in waves. Conspiracy-laced monologues. Personal stories, unverified but deeply emotional. Rage that had nowhere to go, shaped and molded like clay into a manifesto. They called themselves The Reckoning .

“They recruited broken people,” Fury said. “Kids from orphanages. Survivors of collateral damage. People who lost family when a building fell or a Quinjet misfired. People we never knew about. One of the forum admins — now confirmed deceased — had access to pharmaceutical labs overseas. Black market tech. They used promises. Hope. They told their followers they could make them strong enough to fight back. And in this facility, they tried.”

Wanda stared at the next photo. A hallway, smeared with something that wasn’t paint. The door at the end had melted from the hinges. The destruction had come from inside.

"Twenty-three dead," Fury said. "All either scientists or volunteers. Failed experiments. Every subject but one."

A silence dropped like a guillotine.

Steve stepped forward, his arms folded, voice tight. “And the survivor?”

“Gone,” Fury said. “No surveillance footage. No biological trace left behind except a heat signature that fried the sensors.”

“What do we know about them?” Natasha asked. “Who they are?”

Fury’s jaw tensed. Then another slide clicked forward — a fuzzy photograph, obviously taken years ago. A small girl in a hospital bed, wrapped in too-large blankets, holding a nearly destroyed Captain America plush toy clutched to her chest. Her eyes were wide. Hollow. She couldn’t have been more than two.

"Her name was never formally recorded. No ID was found on her parents. Only that she was found in the rubble after the Battle of New York. Buried beneath a collapsed building. Both parents deceased. She survived twelve hours before being found. Taken to a hospital. Then an orphanage. Then foster care. Behavioral issues started by age five. Multiple transfers. Last known name: Subject 739X. Given by The Reckoning, themselves."

Wanda’s fingers curled on the table edge. Something deep in her gut twisted.

“They failed her,” Fury said. “Again and again. And somewhere along the way, she got picked up by this group. Groomed. Told everything that happened to her was our fault. That we killed her family. She believed it. She still does.”

Tony exhaled sharply through his nose, leaning back like the weight of it pressed against his chest. It was far from the first time he had been at the source of blame like this.

"And now," Fury finished, voice like lead, "she's out there. Alone. Angry. And powerful in a way we don’t fully understand."

The room fell silent.

Wanda’s heart thudded, heavy in her chest, because she could feel it already — the echo of something spiraling far beyond their reach. This wasn’t just another mission. This wasn’t an enemy to contain or outsmart. This was a child, left to rot in the shadow of their so-called salvation, made into something weaponized not by science, but by abandonment.

And now, she was coming.

Not for justice.

For revenge.

Chapter Text

It started like any other low-priority mission. A weapons deal just outside the city limits, some mercenaries looking to flip black-market tech scavenged from old HYDRA sites. Easy. Predictable. The kind of mission they didn’t even send the full team for anymore.

Steve had taken point, leading the charge with Bucky covering his six. Natasha moved like shadow through the alleyways, picking off sentries before they even knew she was there. Wanda hovered above the fray, a steady hum of crimson circling her fingers, ready to act if things got messy. Rhodey was overhead in the War Machine suit, scanning for heat signatures. It was clean work. Boring, even.

Until it wasn’t.

The mercenaries had barely begun to retreat when something shifted in the air. It wasn’t seen. It wasn’t heard. It was felt — a sudden stillness, like the Earth had stopped breathing. A pressure, thin and strange, rippled across the space.

Wanda’s head jerked up mid-flight. Her magic pulsed wildly in response, a spike of static dancing across her forearms. Steve called something over the comms, but it crackled and died halfway through.

Then the world exploded.

Not with fire, not with gunfire or bombs, but with force — a sudden, concussive shockwave that knocked Steve off his feet and sent Bucky skidding across the pavement. Natasha went flying from her perch on the third-story window, landing hard in a heap of broken metal and brick.

And then something moved.

Fast.

Too fast to track — not a blur of color, not a defined figure, just motion. Like light bending wrong. Wanda snapped into defense, magic wrapping instinctively around her chest, but whatever it was veered before reaching her. Instead, it struck Rhodey mid-air with enough force to send his suit spiraling sideways, crashing into a water tower and slicing it clean in half.

“ Incoming—! ” Bucky shouted, but the words barely left his mouth before he was hurled into a streetlamp. It bent with the impact and crumpled like paper.

Wanda landed hard on the ground, already throwing up a hex field. “I can’t see her,” she said into the open comm, breathless. “She’s—she’s not phasing—she’s just gone. ”

A heartbeat later, Steve raised his shield to block a strike that never came physically. It was the air itself — a twist of force, a gravitational spike? No. Kinetic manipulation. His arm flared with pain as the shield was wrenched forward , bending at the center like soft metal under a hammer. He stumbled back, staring at the weapon in disbelief. It had taken hits from alien weaponry and Mjölnir itself. It had never bent.

She was here.

They didn’t see her. Not clearly. But flashes registered. A girl — young. Long , unkempt hair streaming like smoke behind her. A glint of something sharp. Cold eyes, furious and gleaming under the blood-red glow of a security light.

“She’s testing us,” Natasha growled through grit teeth, dragging herself out of the rubble. “Or herself. She’s not going for kill shots.”

BANG.

Her own bullet. Mid-fire. Ricocheted midair and snapped into Bucky’s arm — his metal arm, thankfully — but the force was unnatural. Precision perfect. Like someone had pushed it out of its path in a split second. Bucky swore and dropped to one knee, clutching the joint.

“She’s controlling trajectory, ” Wanda said, wide-eyed now. “Not magnetism— movement. Every atom—she’s folding the air around her. I can’t get a lock. I can’t get a mind. It’s like—like she’s not even present in one place.”

Steve flanked left. Natasha right. They moved in a pincer, trying to corner her. Wanda soared higher, trying to get a broader field, to sense anything—pain, fear, even anger—but the girl’s emotional landscape was blank. Hollow. Like a vessel already emptied out.

She landed between them.

Just for a second.

Small. Slender. Fourteen? Fifteen at most. And her eyes… Wanda’s breath caught in her throat. Because for just a flash — a blink of a moment — she saw something there. Not rage. Not bloodlust.

Just pain.

And then the world moved again.

She spun — not her body, the space around her — and the impact sent Steve slamming through a parked van, metal crunching beneath his weight. Natasha barely dodged a steel beam torn from a rooftop, her breath catching sharp as she rolled and came up ready to fire again. Wanda lunged with her magic, tried to grab the girl’s consciousness — not to stop her, just to understand her — but was met with a wall. Not a defense. An absence. Like the mind had trained itself to be unreachable. Like someone had taught her how to hide from even a Maximoff.

The fight lasted ninety seconds.

In that time, four Avengers were incapacitated, two seriously injured. Buildings cracked. Vehicles bent in half. The ground split beneath their feet.

And then—

She was gone.

No flash. No portal. Just absence. Like she’d been swallowed by the void.

Wanda hovered in the air, breath shaking, eyes locked on the spot where the girl had stood.

A scrawl of black ash remained on the pavement, etched in a spiral pattern too precise to be natural. At its center: a single word, carved deep into the concrete as if the molecules had been rearranged to say it.

"REVENGE."

No signature. No demand.

Just a statement.

Wanda landed heavily beside Natasha, who clutched her bleeding side. “Did you see her face?” Wanda asked, her voice barely a whisper.

Natasha nodded once. Grim.

“Kid,” she said. “Young. Angry. Not here to kill. Not yet. She’s seeing what she can get away with.”

Wanda stared down at the word on the ground.

And for the first time in months — maybe years — she felt fear curl cold into her chest.

Because this wasn’t vengeance born of ideology or politics.

This was personal.

And now they knew: she hadn’t vanished.

She’d just been waiting.

Chapter Text

The month that followed the ambush passed in a strange kind of stasis — movement without progress, endless effort with no yield. The mission had ended in chaos, in bruises and splintered egos and injuries that still ached beneath layers of gauze. But what lingered wasn’t pain. It was something colder.

Helplessness.

It sunk in quietly, like water seeping into cracked foundations. They had faced gods, monsters, armies. But nothing like this — not a ghost with the eyes of a child and the hands of a weapon. Not someone who knew them. Who’d clearly studied them. Who had moved through the battlefield not with reckless anger, but with precision.

This wasn’t rage.

It was strategy.

And they knew it.

Steve didn’t speak much for the first few days after it happened. He had bruises down the right side of his ribs, but that wasn’t what kept him up at night. He kept replaying that moment — when his shield bent in the air like soft plastic. No touch. No impact. Just… twisted. It shouldn’t have been possible. Vibranium didn’t yield. And yet it had.

He started carrying his shield more often, even when off-duty. Testing it. Studying it. Bouncing it against the walls in the training room, testing the angle of rebound, the resonance. But no matter how many times he tried, he couldn’t recreate what she’d done.

It wasn’t strength. It was physics rewritten.

When he wasn’t throwing his shield, he was sitting with Bruce, jaw locked as they combed over energy readings. “She bent the field,” Bruce muttered more than once, eyes flicking over waveforms. “Gravitational, maybe, but it’s not gravity. It’s directional. She’s folding force. Like someone gave a twelve-year-old kid mastery over momentum.”

That didn’t comfort Steve. It chilled him to the bone.

Natasha was already hunting.

Not physically, not yet. But digitally — fingers flying over stolen access terminals, bypassing S.H.I.E.L.D. security and scraping every inch of the dark web for anything resembling the spiral symbol, the recruitment phrases, even energy fluctuations that might map out a trail.

She didn’t sleep more than four hours at a time.

Every time she closed her eyes, she saw that bullet — her bullet — ricocheting off an invisible plane and tearing into Bucky’s arm. He hadn’t been mad, of course. Just startled. Said it barely even bruised the paint. But she’d seen the pain in his face. Seen how his arm twitched in the days afterward. She’d been turned against him.

That… didn’t happen to her.

Natasha didn’t like being manipulated.

So she stalked the source like prey. She followed whispers. Dug through message boards that spoke in code. Traced trail after trail until her eyes burned. And when she finally did find something — a half-corrupted post in a buried corner of an encrypted recruitment site, timestamped before the lab explosion — she stared at it for a long time.

“The Avengers made monsters. Now we make weapons. They will remember. ”

Natasha took a screenshot. Then another. Then opened a file titled: Target_Zero.

Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. Then she typed:

Female. ~15 years old. Non-magical anomaly. Aggressive. Strategic. Familiar with Avenger capabilities.
Objective: Observe. Do not engage until more is known.
Name unknown. Aliases Unknown.

Sam had taken a different route. He was with civilians. Media. Contacts on the ground. He’d spent the last few weeks organizing community outreach — not just because they needed it, but because he needed to know what people were hearing.

There were rumors already.

Some of them blamed mutants.

Some called it a new HYDRA op.

Some thought it was a rogue Avenger gone feral.

Sam hated the way the story was already getting away from them. So he did what he did best: he talked. To neighborhood leaders. To school teachers. To overworked nurses and underpaid tech repairmen who remembered odd power outages in abandoned lots. And eventually, he started to see a pattern.

“She’s been seen ,” he told the team one night, a map spread out across the compound conference table. “Not captured. But there are whispers. Power flickers. Equipment frying. Places where electronics don’t work right.”

He circled three zones across the East Coast. Not close enough to pinpoint. But too deliberate to be coincidence.

“She’s moving. ”

Bucky was quiet.

He hadn’t said much since that day — not about the bullet, not about the ricochet, not even about the strange, almost nostalgic dread he’d felt in the girl’s presence. Something in the way she moved reminded him of his days as the Winter Soldier — not the mechanics, but the intent.

Like violence had been carved into her like a second spine.

He didn’t say it out loud, but he knew what it was to be molded like that.

To be turned from grief into vengeance. Weaponized by people who whispered promises of justice when all they wanted was blood.

He didn’t say much. But when Wanda finally broke the silence one night — her voice quiet, full of unresolved grief — he nodded.

“She’s like us,” she said.

He nodded again.

“Not just broken. Built. ”

Wanda never stopped thinking about her.

She’d taken to walking the compound halls alone late at night, listening for things that weren’t there. Her powers had grown quiet lately — no more whispers, no more chaos spiraling beneath her skin. But in the silence, she could feel something.

Like the girl had left an imprint on the space she’d been in. A tension in the air. A breath that hadn’t been exhaled.

Wanda started meditating again. Reaching outward. Not magically — not like she’d done in Westview, not like Agatha had taught her. Just feeling. Trying to pick up the thread again. Hoping the girl would reach back.

Because Wanda knew something the others didn’t.

Chapter Text

There was a scream trapped in her chest.

It clawed against her ribs like a wild animal, begging to be let out, but she couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe right. Couldn’t feel anything except the weight pressing down on her — stone, wood, something jagged — the sharp bite of it cutting into her back and legs. She didn’t even know where her arms were anymore. Somewhere beside her. Numb.

The air was too thick. Like breathing in chalk and blood.

Wanda blinked, and dust fell into her eyes. It coated her lashes, her lips, her tongue. It made everything taste like earth and smoke and copper. Her head throbbed. Her ears rang.

Something wet was sliding down her face. Maybe blood. Maybe tears.

It didn’t matter.

Because the moment she opened her eyes and saw , she forgot everything else.

There it was.

Just a few feet away.

The missile.

Sunk nose-first into the broken floor of what used to be their living room.

She could see the letters. Even in the gloom. Even through the dust.

S-T-A-R-K.

Her whole body went cold.

Not just scared — frozen. A different kind of terror. The kind that hollowed you out from the inside.

The kind that felt like death.

She tried to move her fingers. Couldn’t.

She tried to scream. Nothing came out.

Pietro groaned beside her, weak and raw. She couldn’t even turn her head to look at him, but she knew he was there. She could feel the heat of him, shoulder to shoulder. Pressed so close they could barely breathe.

He was breathing. Shallow. Too fast.

“Pietro,” she rasped.

“Still here,” he whispered.

That’s all they said.

That’s all they could say.

Because if they said more… they’d fall apart.

The world had caved in on them — literally.

The ceiling, the floor, half the dining table — all of it piled above them, around them, beneath them.

They couldn’t move.

They couldn’t scream.

Their parents were—

Wanda blinked.

Her mother’s hand was still visible.

Crushed beneath a beam, fingers outstretched like she’d been reaching for them at the end.

Her father’s body was half-buried under bricks near the shattered wall. The blood had stopped spreading.

They weren’t moving.

They never would again.

And still, the missile sat there.

Silent.

Whole.

Untouched.

Ticking, maybe — she couldn’t hear it over the ringing in her ears — but somehow alive in the way nightmares are alive. Watching them. Waiting. It hadn’t gone off. Not yet. But it could . Any second. It could take them too. Finish what it started.

She counted seconds. Then minutes. Then hours.

She tried to guess how many had passed by the light creeping through a crack above.

Tried to tell herself stories, like Papa used to.

Tried to pretend it wasn’t real.

But it was. It was the realest thing in the world.

This was reality now: a tomb made of their home, a bomb with the name Stark on it, and a brother breathing shallowly beside her, hiding how scared he was for her sake.

Sometimes, she whispered her mother’s name.

Sometimes, she whispered prayers in a voice that shook too much to finish them.

And sometimes, she whispered nothing at all.

Because what was the point?

They stayed like that for two days.

Two days of darkness, thirst, and silence broken only by debris shifting above them. Of trying not to think about how it smelled — the blood, the rot, the chemicals on the missile that made her eyes burn.

Wanda didn’t sleep.

Or maybe she did, and the dreams were just as bad.

Once, she woke up gasping, thinking she’d heard the missile beeping.

But it was nothing.

Just her heartbeat.

Just her brother’s breath.

Just the world not ending yet.

When the rescue team found them, she didn’t believe they were real.

The voices were distant, then close. Then something scraped away stone. Then a flashlight beam cut through the dark.

She screamed. She didn’t mean to — it just happened. Her throat cracked with it. She thought they were going to die right then. Thought the missile would finally go off. Thought the light was fire.

Pietro tried to cover her with his body. His broken, bleeding body.

But nothing exploded.

Hands pulled them from the wreckage.

The sun hit her face like a slap.

She squinted against it.

And the first thing she saw, as she was dragged free into the light, was that missile — still lodged in the floor, still whole, still bearing that single word like a brand:

STARK.

The world called them survivors.

But Wanda didn’t feel like one.

She felt like the only thing that had truly survived that day was the hate.

Hate for that word.

Hate for that name.

Hate for the man behind it, who probably never saw her family. Never knew them. Never thought about what it meant when his name was on a bomb that came crashing into a kitchen during supper.

She hated him.

And she never forgot.

Not the fear.

Not the smell.

Not the stillness of her parents’ bodies as the dust settled.

Not the name.

Stark.

She was crawling.

She didn’t know why. Her knees hurt. One arm wasn’t working right. She was supposed to be crying, she thought. But the tears got stuck. They were in her chest instead. Her mouth tasted like yuck. Her cheek was bleeding a little. She didn’t know that’s what it was called—just that it was wet and sticky and didn’t come off.

There was light, but not enough.

Dust in the air. It made the sky white. Like snow, but hotter. She coughed. Then coughed again. She called out—

“Mama?”

It was soft. Quiet. She didn't like being quiet, usually. She liked being loud. But not now. Everything in her wanted to be small. Hidden.

She saw something blue in the corner of her eye.

A boot.

Big. Shiny. Fast.

It didn’t see her. She didn’t know boots had eyes. But people in them did.

He stepped right on her toy.

Her Captain America.

The one Daddy had said would keep her safe.

She didn’t understand.

She didn’t know what “safe” meant anymore.

The plush’s shield snapped off. One arm ripped sideways. The soft blue was covered in dirt. It crunched beneath the boot like garbage.

And the man just kept running.

The world was all broken now.

Sharp things stuck out of the ground. Cars were on top of each other like toys in a box. She didn’t see Daddy. She didn’t know where he went.

But she saw Mama.

Mama was lying still.

Like she did when she napped. But this wasn’t the couch. There was no blanket. Just bricks and hard stuff and rubble laying over Mama’s legs like a blanket.

The girl crawled closer.

Squeezed through the small space. Her legs scraped. Her dress tore. Her hand found Mama’s dress and tugged, gently.

“Mama…”

No answer.

She laid down next to her. That always helped before. When she was sad. When she had bad dreams.

If she laid next to Mama, everything was okay.

She pulled Mama’s arm over her. Snuggled into it like a blanket. The sleeve was torn. The skin underneath didn’t feel warm. But maybe it would be soon. Maybe Mama was cold and needed her.

There was a loud sound above.

A flash of red in the clouds.

Another big man in metal. Another boom.

More voices. Some yelling. Some laughing. She couldn’t tell what they were saying. Didn’t understand the words. Didn’t know what “collateral damage” meant or “clear the sector” or “get Banner in here.”

She just knew they weren’t coming to get her.

Didn’t even know she was there.

Didn’t care.

She blinked. The dust got on her eyelashes. She felt sleepy.

Her little fingers curled around Mama’s.

They didn’t squeeze back.

“Mama?” she whispered again.

The word cracked.

She thought maybe if she stayed still enough, and quiet enough, and good enough, Mama would wake up. Mama always came when she cried. Always. Mama always saw her.

But now Mama wasn’t looking.

She looked toward where her toy had been. It was broken. Just like the car. Just like the street. Just like the buildings. Just like—

She didn’t think the rest. Couldn’t.

Her baby mind didn’t have words for what she’d lost.

Only feelings.

The world called her a survivor.

But she didn’t feel like one.

She felt like the only thing that had truly survived that day was the hate.

Hate for that word.

Hate for that name.

Hate for the people behind it, who probably never saw her family. Never knew them. Never thought about what it meant when they, in all their glory, came crashing in to “save the day”.

She hated them.

And she never forgot.

Not the fear.

Not the smell.

Not the stillness of her parents’ bodies as the dust settled.

Not the name.

Avengers.

Chapter Text

It had been quiet for three days. Too quiet.

No sightings. No signals. No wreckage.

And that, more than anything, is what unsettled Wanda.

The girl was still out there—of that she was certain. Somewhere beyond their reach, somewhere with shadows long enough to hide in. The world thought the Avengers could see everything, reach anywhere. But Wanda knew better. She had lived in the blind spots. Had been the blind spot. And now this girl—this wounded, feral echo of herself—was doing the same.

And the others?

They were floundering.

Bruce was glued to biometric anomaly reports. Sam was scouring surveillance footage and street cams. Carol was halfway to orbit, scanning for energy readings. Tony’s brain was tired for once, and the rest of the team wasn’t much better off. Natasha was angry, pissed off that she couldn’t sniff this kid out. Steve was trying to be a leader, even when he could see the slight fear in their faces. They’d faced enemies with the might of Thanos and the brain of Ultron. But this was a kid. A very powerful, very angry , child.

So they were scattered. Shaken.

Because when they had found her—briefly, half a month ago—it hadn’t gone well.

Wanda still remembered the heat of that fight. The surge of the girl’s power. Untamed. Terrifying. Familiar.

They’d thought she was panicked, lashing out. But no—Wanda had seen her face. Read it. She’d looked calm. Curious , even.

Like a child testing the strength of a new toy.

She had played with them.

And they’d barely gotten out.

In the compound’s war room, the others were arguing again. Something about tactics. Resource reallocation. Stark tech, satellites, vibranium this or that.

But Wanda didn’t join them.

Not this time.

She kept her hands around her mug, eyes flicking shut as she searched the air. The threads of the world pulsed differently now. Something was coming. Something bitter. Something personal.

And it was close.

Not just physically.

But emotionally . Psychically. Spiritually .

This girl—they still didn’t even know her name—was a loaded weapon primed by grief. And someone, someone , had taught her where to aim.

Far across the city, three stories beneath the earth, fluorescent light buzzed low and cruel. The air in the bunker was sterile—too clean, too quiet. Like a morgue pretending to be a training ground.

The girl stood in front of the mirror, motionless.

Her reflection stared back at her like a stranger.

Gone was the child who used to giggle in the aisles of toy stores, who rode on her father’s shoulders, clutching juice with sticky fingers. Gone was the little girl who cried for her mother beneath crushed steel, clutching a Captain America plush to her chest, waiting for someone— anyone —to dig her out.

That girl was gone.

What remained was sharpened. Whittled down by years of silence, trial, and isolation. Her eyes, once wide with wonder and fear, were now rimmed in a tired kind of anger—the kind that no longer flared bright, but smoldered constantly, like coals left untended.

She didn’t recognize herself.

Her jaw was sharper now, clenched from stress. Her cheekbones cut hard angles beneath skin too pale from the lack of sunlight. Her clothes were military black, all harsh lines and no softness. No unnecessary detail. No color.

Even her hair had been pulled back in a tight knot, like it, too, had learned there was no place for carelessness here.

There was no softness left.

And there hadn’t been for a long time.

The plush—the one from before, the one her mother had coaxed her into hugging while Daddy made dumb jokes at checkout—was threads now. She’d used it to test out her abilities. Abilities that felt like they fed on her pain and made her stronger.

It didn’t matter.

She didn’t need toys anymore.

She needed revenge .

She needed answers .

She needed the world to look at her this time .

The silence of the room was broken only by the mechanical whir of the security door behind her. A hiss of hydraulics. A shift in pressure.

“Are you ready?”

The voice was low. Unfeeling. Measured. It didn’t belong to a parent, or a friend, or even a teacher. It belonged to the one who’d built her into this. The one who had shown her how to hold her grief like a knife.

But the words weren’t a question.

They were a trigger .

She didn’t answer right away.

She just kept looking at herself in the mirror. Her breathing was steady, eyes unmoving.

There was something terrifying in her stillness—like a storm waiting to break open. Like the air before lightning.

Her eyes, once so small and curious, now looked impossibly deep. Bottomless. As if they’d stared at death so long they’d started to become it.

Eyes that held storms .

She didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink.

She nodded once.

And when she did, something behind her eyes shifted. Something final. Something irrevocable.

The girl in the mirror didn’t look like a teenager anymore.

She looked like a weapon.

A ghost sharpened by grief.

A reckoning no one saw coming.

And this time, no one would step over her in the rubble.

This time , the great Avengers wouldn’t be heralded as heroes. The world would see them for what they were.

Killers in spandex suits. People who destroyed cities and didn’t turn back to help with the rubble. 

This time , the Avengers would fall.

Back on the balcony, Wanda’s grip tightened.

She felt it.

The pulse of a mind like hers. A heart like hers.

A girl groomed by hatred.

A girl no one saved.

A girl who now believed that the only way to survive was to become the thing everyone else was afraid of.

Wanda remembered what that felt like.

And it chilled her more than any battle ever had.

Because if they didn’t reach her soon—if they didn’t find her in the ashes of who she used to be—

They would face something far worse than an enemy.

They would face a reflection.

And reflections, Wanda knew, were the hardest things to destroy.

Especially when they looked just like you.

Chapter Text

Snow clung to the edges of buildings like frosting. It coated taxis and park benches, softened the corners of sidewalks, and turned fire escapes into glittering ladders of ice. The city sparkled—fairy lights in every window, wreaths on every lamppost, carolers half-frozen but still singing under flickering LED stars.

It was almost Christmas in New York. Loud. Messy. Alive.

Fifth Avenue was a crush of coats and shopping bags, peppermint steam wafting from sidewalk vendors, children dragging sleds behind them across slush. Saks had turned their windows into winter wonderlands: animatronic reindeer, ballerinas pirouetting through snow, glowing castles in crystal forests. Rockefeller Plaza pulsed with tourists, their phones held high to capture the massive tree glowing with twenty-five thousand lights.

It was everything the city promised in December: bright, noisy, joyful.

Until it stopped.

It was subtle at first—barely noticeable. A few blinking screens in Times Square. A pause in the rotating ads. Someone’s phone flickered in their hand, the screen dimming, then vanishing altogether.

And then, all at once, it happened.

Every screen in Times Square—every glowing ad, every cartoon snowflake, every luxury brand’s holiday campaign—blinked off like candles snuffed out by wind.

Black.

Phones went dark. Billboards, too. Even the scrolling ticker above the Nasdaq building stuttered and fell silent, mid-sentence. A woman laughed nervously. A child pointed. Somewhere, a car alarm shrilled into the silence.

For three full seconds, the city seemed to hold its breath.

And then the screens came alive again.

But not with ads. Not with song lyrics or price drops.

With footage.

Not modern footage, either. Not anything sleek or cinematic or polished.

Old. Grainy. Unearthed like a time capsule cracked open.

2012.

It began quietly—just a bird’s eye view of the skyline, the familiar sprawl of Manhattan—but with smoke billowing between buildings. Sirens screaming far below. A voice crackled over police radio. Chatter. Static. Panic.

Then: chaos.

A building’s glass front exploded. The Hulk came crashing through it, roaring, covered in ash and debris. He barreled into a city bus, toppling it like a toy. People scattered, screaming, vanishing beneath clouds of dust.

A new angle. Street level. Civilians sprinted past the camera, eyes wide, mouths open in terror. Steve Rogers launched himself off the roof of a car, using its shattered windshield as a springboard. The camera lingered for half a second too long on the car—on the two slumped bodies inside. Blood on the glass. A child’s shoe hanging off a tiny foot.

Another angle—grainy security footage, timestamped. Iron Man flying low, weaving between buildings too fast. He clipped the edge of a brownstone. Windows burst inward. Glass rained down like shrapnel. A fire sparked on the third floor. The camera caught the moment a Chitauri skiff screamed after him, opening fire. A bolt struck a food truck. There was no one left standing.

Then: Natasha Romanoff and Clint Barton, running through a crumbling alley. Their weapons drawn, their faces set like stone. But the camera didn’t follow them. It focused downward.

On the bodies.

Dozens of them. Civilians, not soldiers. Burned. Crushed. Discarded.

Forgotten.

The footage flickered and jumped, like an old VHS tape unspooling the past. A Leviathan crashed into Grand Central, sending up a wave of destruction that flattened rows of yellow taxis. The sky, once a rich December blue, turned the color of fire.

Then the voice came.

Not synthetic. Not distorted. But raw.

A girl’s voice. A teenager. Young, but deliberate. Clear.

“This is what you call saving the world?”

A new clip: Steve Rogers, eyes wild, shouting orders, using a flipped car as cover. Behind him, the twisted wreckage of what had once been a school bus. No movement inside.

“You never looked down.”

Thor landed with a boom of lightning, hammer swinging. The shockwave sent civilians tumbling. A woman hit a pole. A man landed hard on a curb. The footage paused on one frame—his arm bent the wrong way, his eyes half-closed, unfocused.

“You cleaned up the sky. But never the streets.”

Then: a shaky police bodycam video. This one never aired publicly. The timestamp showed it had been buried deep in city archives, misfiled or forgotten.

It showed a small figure in the rubble.

A child.

Dust-covered, half-buried beneath a collapsed roof beam. She didn’t cry. She just pressed herself against the cold body beside her, hands tangled in dark hair matted with blood.

A paramedic moved into frame—lifting the girl gently, murmuring to her. She didn’t respond.

The camera zoomed slightly, adjusting. The screen froze.

The toddler’s face—wide, stunned, empty.

Her tiny hand still gripped the edge of her mother’s jacket.

“You call them heroes,” the voice said. Not angry. Not yet. 

Silence fell again. The footage stopped.

Then came a final message—typed text, white on black.

One line.

I call them killers.

And then—nothing.

The screens went black.

All of them.

Not even a flicker of color remained. No carolers sang. No traffic rumbled. Even the air seemed thinner, the sky heavier. The city, usually impossible to silence, stood paralyzed.

Under the weight of memory. Under the weight of guilt.

Avengers Compound

The alert came before the screens went dark—but not fast enough.

“Stark’s tech is breached,” Maria Hill snapped, eyes flying over the satellite uplink. “It’s not isolated. It’s global. Every screen, every tower, every platform. This wasn’t a leak. It was an infiltration.”

“She wanted us to see it,” Wanda said softly.

The room was dim, screens still glowing with the last frames of the footage. The light cut sharp lines across Steve’s jaw, where his teeth were clenched tight.

Bruce stood behind a console, his knuckles pale against the table. “The data spike was timed with near-perfect synchronization. She must’ve built the upload over weeks—months. Layered encryption. This was methodical.”

“Calculated,” Natasha murmured, her voice colder than the wind outside. She stood with her arms crossed, but her fingers twitched slightly. She had recognized that alley. She remembered running through it. She remembered the bodies.

Wanda walked to the window. Snow had started to fall, soft and silent. The trees outside were bare, their branches ghostlike against the glass.

“She’s not hiding anymore,” Wanda whispered.

Steve turned to her. “What do you mean?”

“She’s starting.”

“Starting what?”

Wanda didn’t answer at first. Her eyes followed a single snowflake down the windowpane. Something deep in her chest twisted—an ache she recognized too well. Grief. Rage. Recognition.

“She’s starting her war.”

Silence followed, broken only by the quiet hum of a cooling tower far above them.

Hill looked up sharply. “We need to trace the signal. Now.”

“Already on it,” Bruce muttered, pulling up command lines. “But it was routed through eight different countries and a ghost VPN I’ve never seen before. This isn’t a hacker. It’s a campaign.”

“She planned this,” Steve said grimly. “She chose Christmas. She knew it would hit harder.”

“She wanted it to,” Natasha said. “The contrast. The lights, the joy—then the truth. That’s what she was going for.”

“She’s not a terrorist,” Wanda added. “Not yet. Not in the way we’d define it.”

Steve looked at her. “Then what is she?”

Wanda finally turned to face him.

“She’s a child who survived hell. And she wants to burn the people who left her there.”

No one spoke.

Because they all knew, in one way or another, what that looked like.

Natasha looked down at her hands. Her gloves were off, and her fingers were pale from clenching too tightly.

She thought of the girl.

Covered in ash. Curled against her mother.

Forgotten.

Unrecognizable.

Chapter Text

7 Hours After the Broadcast
New York City

Confusion was the first wave.

For a few stunned seconds after the final screen went black, the city stood frozen—caught mid-step, mid-breath, mid-song. People who had been bustling with shopping bags and hot cocoa now stared at the hollow, lifeless LED displays as though waiting for the lights to flicker back on and say, Just kidding.

They didn’t.

Instead, a cold wind moved through the streets, tangling with the silence.

A street vendor near Bryant Park was the first to speak. “What the hell did we just watch?”

Nobody answered. A few feet away, a little girl clutched her mother's hand tighter and whispered, "Was that real?"

By the time someone uploaded the bodycam footage to TikTok, the city had already begun to murmur. Whispers turned to questions. Questions turned to outrage.

Fifteen minutes: 4 million views.

Thirty minutes: Every major social media platform flooded.

#MiracleOrMassacre trended in twelve languages.

News anchors stammered through their reports. Some tried to frame it as a hoax. Others looked genuinely shaken. The footage was too raw, too specific to be fabricated. And that voice—that voice of a teenage girl speaking with all the fury and clarity of the forgotten—was not something easily dismissed.

Macy’s shut its doors early. Broadway shows were canceled mid-performance. Police cordoned off Times Square as crowds began to swell, not with tourists this time, but with signs, demands, tears.

One banner flapped in the wind from a fire escape: WE REMEMBER THE DEAD.

Washington, D.C. — The White House, Situation Room

The air in the Situation Room was taut, pulled like wire. Every monitor showed the footage on loop—frames slowed, analyzed, scrubbed for metadata. There was nothing new in them after the sixth viewing, but nobody could look away.

“This wasn’t a cyber prank,” the Cybersecurity Director said. Her voice was tight with controlled panic. “This was an infiltration at a global scale. Stark-level firewalls, SHIELD’s old encryptions, even foreign defense agencies were pinged and bypassed. Simultaneously.”

A senator leaned forward. “So who the hell is she?”

“No confirmed identity. She masked her signal bounce through no less than seventeen dead satellites. The voiceprint was distorted just enough to avoid full matches. It’s military-grade work. Maybe better.”

“That’s not a rogue teenager with a grudge,” someone muttered. “That’s a declaration.”

The Secretary of State stood with arms crossed. “This girl—whoever she is—just made the Avengers look like global war criminals. If public sentiment turns fully against them…”

Another silence fell.

Then, slowly, deliberately, the Secretary of Defense spoke.

“What if she’s right?”

All heads turned.

He tapped his knuckles against the polished table. “We’ve known for years the collateral damage was high. We told ourselves it was worth it. But now? The world’s asking if we turned a blind eye to murder in exchange for protection. If the Avengers are weapons—who gave them permission to choose targets?”

Someone else added, “And what if she has more footage? If this was just the first drop, what’s next?”

No one dared to answer.

Avengers Compound, Hudson River

It was like standing in the eye of a storm.

The Avengers’ strategy room had become a command center of noise and motion. Every screen showed something different—viral clips, live news coverage, protest surveillance. A rotating ticker crawled across the central monitor listing cities reporting unrest.

Seoul. Berlin. Johannesburg. London. San Francisco. Rome.

Sam paced back and forth, jaw tight. “We’ve had enemies before. Alien invasions. Rogue AIs. Hell, even Thanos. But this? This is a PR nightmare with teeth.”

“More than PR,” Bruce murmured, his glasses low on his nose as he sifted through frame-by-frame playback. “This isn’t just public shaming. She’s crafting a narrative. One where we’re the villains. The executioners hiding behind a good story.”

“She picked her moment perfectly,” Natasha said, voice low, eyes scanning an ancient-looking file marked “2012 — NYPD Unconfirmed Casualties.” “Christmas. New York. Everyone’s watching. And she gave them a new lens to see the past through.”

Wanda stood still at the window, snowflakes catching in her hair. The world outside was turning white, but her gaze was focused inward. “She’s not random,” she said, almost to herself.

Clint crossed his arms. “You think it’s personal?”

Wanda nodded slowly. “It’s too precise to be anything else. She didn’t hack into one system—she hit every major network. All the screens, synced to the second. That kind of coordination doesn’t happen unless you’ve been planning it for years.”

Steve was stone-faced. “What kind of planning can a kid do? She couldn’t have been more than two or three during the Battle of New York.”

Wanda finally turned away from the window, eyes heavy. “You don’t need memories to carry trauma. Sometimes it gets baked into your bones.”

There was a long pause.

Then Friday’s voice echoed through the speakers: “I have something.”

Everyone turned.

The main screen changed. A photo, grainy and color-drained, appeared. Timestamp: May 4, 2012.

The toddler, covered in dust and blood, curled beside a woman’s crushed body. Her expression—blank, hollow. The kind of emptiness too deep for a child to fake.

“Unidentified child pulled from wreckage near Grand Central,” JARVIS explained.

Then the image shifted—this time, a security still from the recent warehouse explosion in Jersey.

Black hoodie. Slim frame. The face hidden by shadows and ash. But the posture, the walk—it triggered a match.

“Probability of ID: 87.4%,” JARVIS confirmed. “No name. No fingerprints. All traces erased.”

Natasha’s voice was like flint striking stone. “She didn’t just survive. She vanished.”

Wanda looked at the girl’s blurred face on the screen. Her fingers curled slightly at her sides. “She became a ghost. And now she’s haunting us.”

Steve took a slow breath. “Why now?”

Bruce offered, “Maybe she’s been collecting evidence. Following us. Learning who we are, how we move, what we hide.”

Clint grimaced. “She attacked our image.”

“Because image is what makes people forgive us,” Wanda said softly. “The world looked away from the wreckage because we were beautiful, and brave, and bright. She’s showing them the blood again.”

Silence settled over the room. Heavy. Knowing.

Sam finally broke it. “We need to find her. Not just to stop what she’s planning—but to understand how the hell a kid got this far under the radar.”

Steve nodded grimly. “JARVIS, expand the search. Look into orphan records. Missing persons. Anyone placed near the battle perimeter that day who dropped off the grid.”

“Yes, Captain.”

As the team broke to their tasks, Wanda remained at the window.

Outside, snow continued to fall, quiet and clean. The kind of peace that never lasted long.

“She doesn’t want peace,” Wanda whispered to herself.

“She wants vengeance.”