Wanda and Amanda

[x-scarletwitch.livejournal.com]

After giving Amanda some space, Wanda comes calling to see how her assistant is coping.



Outside of Amanda's door, Wanda paused to juggle the bottles in her hand before knocking. "Amanda? It's Wanda." She'd given Amanda the weekend to decompress with Angelo after the trouble with the Church of Humanity, doing a little bit of digging on her own, before deciding to drop by.

There was a pause, and then the door opened, revealing a still tired-looking witch. The dark circles were receding from under her eyes, at least, but she was still obviously drained. "Hey, Boss Lady," she said with a small smile. "House call?"

"House call with drinks," Wanda replied, smiling. She held up the bottles. "Part of my birthday present from my Uncle Django. One of my favorite brews from Germany and good enough that I sent some over to Cain for his birthday. Care to join me?"

Amanda winced at the word 'birthday'. "Oh, sod it, I forgot it, didn't I?" she groaned, opening the door fully and waving Wanda inside. "'M sorry. 'Self-absorbed' doesn't even begin to describe the past couple of weeks."

Wanda chuckled as she came in. "Your brain must be swiss cheese," she teased, "since you were the only one to remember on the actual day. You left me a cupcake on my desk but it was in the middle of that horrible time with Farouk and the astral plane. If it had not been for that reminder, I doubt I would have remembered it."

"I did? Oh, right, I did. Maybe Doc Curt missed something with the brain scan and I've wiped out a chunk of the grey matter." Amanda closed the door and directed Wanda to the living area where the couch and the comfy chairs were. There was a bra sticking out from under the couch, and she grabbed it and moved to toss it into her bedroom before closing that door. "I'd ask for a holiday, but I just had a week off. Must be getting old or something, forgetting stuff."

Handing over one of the bottles, Wanda got settled on the couch before answering. "Old, please," she scoffed. "Be careful or I will be forced to order you off my lawn. But the forgetting thing...it might be stress, do you think?" The astral plane mess, dealing with Farouk afterwards and the fight in the tunnels...it had been a stressful month, all around.

Amanda opened her bottle of beer and had a hefty swig before answering. "Might explain why I agreed to teach Farouk in the first place - temporary insanity caused by stress? It's not like he's actually got any talent for it and I'm only teaching the history and theory behind it, not actual spells, but that's quite enough as is. Tho' leaving him alone in my apartment wasn't the brightest idea -cagey bastard went straight for the shelves by the looks of it." She grimaced. "I'm such a crap spy sometimes, Wanda. Makes me wonder why you lot keep me on."

Wanda's foot gently shoved Amanda's knee. "Stop that," she warned. "I doubt he would have gotten his hands on anything incredibly important or dangerous, we keep those scattered for a reason these days. Still, I would not trust him as far as I can throw him and now we have even more proof of that. You're invaluable to us, you know this, but, like I said, stressed lately. And with good reason."

"Well, all the serious stuff is in your apartment, and I'm not about to leave him loose in there." Amanda had another drink from the beer bottle, and then rubbed her eyes. "Not sleeping too well lately -haven't really for a while now, but the other night's just made it worse."

"Do you want to talk about it?" Wanda asked, beer bottle dangling from her finger tips.

Amanda shrugged. "Well, part of it was Angelo... we had a fight, back when Nate got shot, and it didn't really get sorted, not really. The astral plane, and me taking off back home... that didn't help. We were patching things up when Miguel turned up." The animation left her face a little, and she looked down at the floor. "Things got pretty bad down there, Wanda."

Shifting, Wanda sat with her arms over her knees, the bottle dangling between then loosely. "Friends taken into the Morlock tunnels of all places," she said quietly. "A dangerous and bad situation before you even managed to get down there." She left it there -- an open but comfortable silence. If Amanda wanted to elaborate past what Wanda had seen in the report, then she could. But if not, that was fine as well.

Fingers picking at the label on the bottle, Amanda nodded without looking up. "And it got worse. Wanda... I killed people down there. Not in the fighting, but after. Miguel was dying, so I used the people who were left down there to power a healing spell."

Well, hell, no wonder Amanda was in this state. As much as the healing was a useful thing, Wanda knew that there'd been a lot of issues in the past. And while having to take lives in the heat of battle was something they all faced...she nodded and took another sip of her beer. "You really had no choice in the matter -- Miguel would not have survived otherwise. But it does not mean it was an easy choice."

"They'd killed a bunch of kids. Strung them up on crosses and left them down there to die. They deserved the same, and what I did was a lot less painless. Just... well, I keep thinking about what happened at the school, with Remy. People called me a monster back then, Wanda, and I didn't even hurt anyone. What does it make me now?" She looked up at last, eyes shadowed with worry. "And there's a part of me that's wondering if maybe I'm too weak for the job, to be stressing out over

a bunch of dead murdering fucks." She sighed. "I'm all over the place. Which Sof says is normal, but still, nothing about this is normal."

"What does it make you now?" Wanda parroted back, tilting her head. "It makes you only what you will let it make you, Amanda." With a steady gaze, she caught Amanda's eyes with her own. "You cannot expect to come out of that unchanged but give that change a path. Learn from it, grow from it. You saved a life, again, and no one would expect you to mourn those other lives. But don't forget those deaths."

She had no idea who those people actually were in New Orleans but their deaths were engraved upon her, another burden to carry. But the fact that Amanda was near enough to touch, drawing another breath, made that burden a little easier to shoulder.

Amanda held Wanda's gaze for a moment, and then dropped hers again, taking another swig of beer. When she looked up again, it was with a slight easing of her expression. "I... Thanks, Boss Lady," she said. "You're always good at talking sense to me."

"We all have our talents." Wanda winked, smiling gently, before raising her bottle. "To seeing the morning after," she toasted solemnly.

"The morning after," Amanda echoed, and clinked her bottle against Wanda's.