Reassembled, Chapter 3

[seanchai.livejournal.com]

Title: Reassembled, Chapter 3
Authors: seanchai and elspethdixon
Universe: 616, AU from the end of Civil War
Rated: PG-13
Pairings: Steve/Tony, Hank/Jan, various other supporting character pairings, both canon and not.
Warnings: Some swearing and violence, references to past dub-con (mind-control-induced).
Disclaimer: The characters and situations depicted herein belong to Stan Lee and Marvel comics. No profit is being made off of this fan-written work. We're paid in love, people.

Beta: dorothy1901, who did a wonderful job of catching our many, many typos. grey_bard and several others helped with brainstorming.

Summary: The long-delayed conclusion to Resurrection-verse. Registration is long gone, several people are back from the dead, and Steve and Tony have put their lives and their team back together. Mostly. One long-time Avenger is still missing. Now she’s back, and Chthon has come with her.

Reassembled


Chapter Three


Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum had been disguised as an under-construction Starbucks, complete with a limp banner that proclaimed an opening date several months away. The familiar metal construction scaffolding and black safety netting that one saw all over the city had almost entirely obscured the building's Victorian façade – until Wanda looked more closely, and the construction debris wavered and faded, glimpses of the untouched house beneath the illusion showing through.

It was nearly full dark now, the sun having set some ten blocks ago, and she could feel the raw throbbing of a blister on her left heel. When she had come to a stop where Dr. Strange's house should be and seen a vacant building she had wanted to scream with frustration– she had nowhere else to go, and was so tired that part of her just wanted to curl up on the ground and go to sleep, except that that would have meant handing herself back over to Chthon – and the realization that it wasn't empty after all seemed to drain the rest of her energy from her.

She would be safe now. One way or another, Strange could keep Chthon away.

Wanda let her carry-on bag fall to the muddy ground of Strange's minuscule front yard – a tiny patch of green that was a spacious luxury by Manhattan standards – and limped up the front steps, walking straight through the non-existent "Starbucks – Coming Spring of '08" banner.

The knocker on Strange's door was heavy, made out of some kind of metal that looked like brass and hummed under her fingers like something formed of far less commonplace materials. She had been here dozens of times, and each time, the pattern engraved into the metal had been slightly different.

A long moment of silence followed her knock, and the door failed to open. She raised her hand and hammered on the wood with her fist, and was considering kicking it when she finally heard the scrape of a bolt being drawn back, and a low murmuring that sounded like someone disarming a magical ward.

Wong's eyes went wide when he saw her standing on the threshold.

"I need help," Wanda blurted out before he could say anything, or make a move to treat her as a potential threat. "Please, I have to see Strange."

She must have looked even more exhausted and bedraggled than she felt, because Wong didn't even ask any questions; he just stepped aside and let her in.

Hours later, Wanda sat on the sofa in Strange's study, drinking tea and watching the sky outside his huge, round window slowly shading into dawn. She felt empty, hollowed out, and so exhausted that she no longer felt like sleeping – just an ache in her head and a gritty burn in her eyes.

Strange, seated across from her and cradling a cup of tea in both gloved hands, looked nearly as worn out as she felt, the bones of his face standing out harshly; crafting seals strong enough to stand against a being as powerful as Chthon was a massive magical work, and even the Sorcerer Supreme apparently could not do it easily. Before he had set the seal on her, he had seemed magnetically appealing, attractive in a way she'd never seen before – even Vision and Simon couldn't have compared to the power Chthon's essence had sensed in him, and the trace of Chthon's taint in Wanda had been drawn to it, had wanted to pour itself into him, possess him as it had her.

Then the black, angular lines of the seals had formed on her skin – on her hands, on the back of her neck – and Chthon's presence had ceased battering at the frayed edges of the mental walls she'd thrown up against him as abruptly as a candle being blown out. Now, Strange seemed like an ordinary man, no more or less appealing than any other, and the ceaseless whispering that had echoed through her skull for longer than she could remember was finally silent.

Chthon had used her to murder. To attack and kill and destroy the people she loved. And then he'd tried to use her to destroy the world, manipulating her and Pietro both into it. And then...

She couldn't think of a more terrible use of her powers, save for mass slaughter. To strip people's mutations away – it was like rape, like mutilation. And to do it to all mutantkind came sickeningly close to genocide, in intent if not in actuality.

All her power had been tied up in maintaining the spell, Strange had said, in magically suppressing the expression of thousands upon thousands of X-genes. When she had broken free of Chthon and cut the spell loose, she had ended the flow of power that had sustained it.

"The shockwaves of your struggle against Chthon yesterday afternoon reverberated through this entire plane of reality," Strange was saying. "I could feel the universe attempting to restore itself to its proper shape, to correct the damage done, like air rushing in to fill a vacuum. I suspect that if one of us were to turn on a television, the news would be filled with accounts of mutants whose powers have been miraculously and abruptly restored."

"But not all of them," Wanda said.

"No," he agreed, "not all of them. Likely not even half. Undoing the spell in its entirety would take far more power than either of us possesses."

"But I was the one who cast it in the first place," she said, softly, hating the truth in the words. "Couldn't I-"

"No," Strange interrupted, holding up a hand to cut her off. "You cast the spell while possessed by Chthon, with his power amplifying your own. To completely undo it, you would need to channel Chthon's power again."

She shuddered, the thought of the hours – months – she'd spent as a prisoner in her own mind making her stomach twist. If she tapped into Chthon's powers to augment her own, he would have her again, seals or no seals. Strange's spells were powerful, but the seals that protected her could be broken if she put them under enough pressure.

Wanda stared down at her hands, at the circular, symmetrical marks that now decorated the backs of them. They looked like tattoos, black as ink against her skin, but where fresh tattoos would have stung and throbbed, these were painless. It hadn't been painless when Strange and Wong had put them on, Wong drawing them on her skin with a brush and ink while Strange chanted an invocation to the Vishanti that had seemed to last for hours. His voice had risen to a crescendo at the end, and the drying ink on her skin had burned like acid for one terrible, endless moment, as Chthon's scream of wrath had echoed in her head, then cut off as abruptly as a door slamming.

She twisted her fingers around each other, not looking back up to where Strange sat mercifully silent. The place inside her where Chthon had been felt empty, blessedly quiet. Her powers felt quiet, too. The last thing she could remember clearly before Mount Wundagore was chaos magic surging through her, warping the world around her at her slightest whim, too powerful for her to control, for anyone to control.

Strange's seals had walled that away from her, too. Her powers were back under her conscious control again, he'd promised her. They wouldn't be as strong as they had been while Chthon had had her – he had forced her mutation to Omega levels, altered it to suit his whims until she could mold the world around her in ways that probability altering or chaos energy should never have been able to accomplish – but they were hers again, and if she had less energy to fuel her hexes, it was a small price to pay for freedom.

It was even fitting, in a way. She had shut down thousands of people's powers; losing some of hers in order to prevent such a thing from happening again was an odd kind of justice.

"I am afraid," Strange's voice broke the silence abruptly, "that I owe you an apology."

Jolted out of her reverie, Wanda looked up at him. "For what? I can't thank you enough. You probably saved my sanity."

Strange hesitated, looking almost embarrassed. It was not an emotion she normally associated with the Sorcerer Supreme. "Your teammates called me in to help them when your magic went out of control." His voice was hoarse, the wear of hours' worth of spell casting obvious despite the calm, unruffled air he projected. He'd put at least four spoonfuls of sugar into the tea he was drinking; Wanda had always assumed that her own shaky hunger after major spells and hexes was an effect of having an energy mutation, but it apparently affected him the same way. "I assumed you had accessed a higher level of your powers, or developed a secondary mutation, and that the new, reality-altering nature of your powers had driven you mad. Omega-level mutants are almost invariably unstable, and many magicians lose their grip on this reality after too long spent on other planes of existence."

"You put me to sleep," she said slowly, remembering.

Strange winced, but didn't look away. "I didn't notice Chthon's presence in your mind. It didn't even occur to me to look. It was an arrogant mistake, and one that has cost you and many others a great deal."

It was probably the most abject apology she was ever going to hear from him. Strange was not a man who admitted to mistakes easily. "I didn't notice him either," Wanda said, unsure if she was angry at Strange or not. If he'd been able to set the seals on her then, before Chthon had taken control of her completely and started to influence Pietro... "I don't even know how long he was there, pretending to be Agatha."

"When your teammates searched Agatha Harkness's house, she had been dead for some time. I'm afraid he may have been influencing you for far longer than anyone suspected."

Wanda thought of Agatha dying alone, of her being replaced by some form of construct that had pretended to be her for months without any of her friends ever noticing, and shuddered. "He killed her, too?"

"There's no way of knowing that." Strange waved a hand, dismissing her guilt. "Chthon may simply have taken advantage of her death and the closeness of her relationship to you and used the opportunity to manipulate you."

The thought that Agatha's death might not have occurred at Chthon's hands was little comfort. Even if that was the case, it wouldn't bring her back, and the weight of the months she had spent believing in something that wasn't Agatha, neither missing her nor mourning her, loomed oppressively over her. It was only one of many regrets.

"He used me to destroy the Avengers. How much did I..." she trailed off, then tried again. "Is everyone that's... left... okay?"

She shoved away the memory of Vision disintegrating in front of her eyes and braced herself for Strange's answer.

He hesitated, clearly choosing his words with care. "There's been a great deal of trouble and conflict in your absence, as I'm sure you've heard."

Wanda nodded dully. The Registration Act. Steve's death. During the long walk from St. Margaret's, she'd managed to piece together more than she'd wanted to from her fragmented memories of Clint's conversation.

"The SHRA has, thankfully, been repealed-"

Wanda closed her eyes for a moment, surprised at the strength of the relief she felt. She hadn't been aware of the Registration Act while it had been in effect, but just the name was chilling. Superhuman Registration. Mutant Registration. Even before Bishop and Cable and the X-Men's other travelers from future time-lines had arrived with doomsday warnings about the future, she had known where those kind of political policies led. Everyone who'd ever been a member of the Brotherhood of Mutants knew; Magneto had made sure of it.

First they made you put your name down on an official list, so they could 'keep track of you.' Then they marked you, so they could tell you apart from the normal people, for 'the public good.' Then the sentinels came for you.

Of all of Magneto's rhetoric, that had been the one part she'd never had trouble believing.

"-and Iron Man and Captain America have, ah, resolved their differences and reformed an Avengers team."

Iron Man and—

Wanda stared at him, not daring to believe that she'd heard that correctly. "I thought Cap was dead," she interrupted.

"He got better," Strange said dryly. "Victor von Doom brought him back from the dead with black magic. I was able to intervene and make the situation permanent."

"Brought him back? As in, really back? Not dead?" If she sounded silly, it was difficult to care. Only this morning, she had been sure that almost everyone she loved was gone, in no small part through her own actions. Knowing that they weren't–

She blinked suddenly hot eyes as Strange nodded – "Yes, really not dead," – and drew in a long, shaky breath. Steve was alive. Clint was alive. Simon and Tony were alive. She still had family left, despite Chthon's best efforts.

She'd already asked about Pietro, even though just the thought of what Strange might say had filled her stomach with a sick, hollow pain, but he had been able to tell her nothing, offering only the vague reassurance that Chthon had probably not been able to possess him the way he had Wanda, and that he'd likely been able to influence him only while he'd been in close physical proximity to her. Did her brother still have his powers? Had he been one of the lucky ones who'd been spared, or one of the people her spell had destroyed? Even if he had been, it didn't mean—his powers might have been restored last night, when she had ended the spell. His mutation was primarily energy-based, like hers, like Magneto's. It had been the people with major physical mutations who had died, and the mutants with flying powers who had been airborne. Unless Pietro had been running over water. He did that, sometimes, just to show off, or for the sheer joy of running as far as he could without needing to slow down.

Just because Strange had heard nothing didn't necessarily mean he was dead. Strange had little contact with the X-Men or any other mutant organization, outside of the occasional meeting with Xavier, and Pietro was unlikely to go to anyone who was neither a mutant nor an Avenger for help.

The X-Men would know for certain, would probably be able to give her every detail of what had happened to her brother over the past year, but asking them was out of the question. No mutant who knew what she had done was ever going to willingly speak to her again. Not to the woman who had accomplished with one sentence what Reverend Stryker and dozens of other anti-mutant Extremists had tried to achieve for decades. Even Pietro, if he was all right, might not want anywhere near him.

How could she look him in the eyes, now, after everything both of them had done?

No. She took another deep breath and made herself focus on positive things. Steve was alive. Clint was alive. The superhuman population was not going to be rounded up and imprisoned. Chthon couldn't touch her anymore, as long as she was careful in using her powers. Some of the people she had hurt had been healed, when she'd broken the spell suppressing their X genes.

"I can take you back to your teammates," Strange offered several minutes later, when both of their teacups were empty and Wanda had regained some of her composure.

She wanted to refuse, a small, cowardly part of her wanting to put for as long as possible the moment when she would have to see her friends and family face-to-face and apologize for what she had done to them. Warring with that, though, was the need to see the rest of the Avengers for herself, to assure herself that Steve, Clint, Simon, and the others truly were all right. To go home, finally.

"I'd like to get some sleep first, if you and Wong don't mind putting me up for the night. Or, well, the day."

Strange shrugged, an elegant motion. "After my failure to help you earlier, a place to sleep is the least I can do."

* * *

"I don't even know what's in half of these." Steve gestured at the cardboard boxes that were stacked neatly along the walls of their newly completed bedroom, each one labeled in Jarvis's precise script. They had spent the past month stacked in his and Tony's bedroom in Stark Tower, and the months before that in a closet somewhere; Steve had gotten used to living out of a suitcase and one borrowed drawer in Tony's dresser.

He wasn't sure which was stranger: the fact that his entire life could be packed away in a dozen boxes, or the fact that he'd once had so much stuff.

"Just pick one and open it," Tony suggested from the bed, where he was leaning back on his elbows and looking thoroughly debauched in a way that begged to be sketched, if only Steve had known which box held his art supplies. "I don't know what's in them, either." His own collection of boxes was smaller than Steve's, but only because at least sixty percent of the things he'd wanted to bring over from the tower were already sitting downstairs in the mansion's lab. Several of the larger pieces of equipment had had to be hauled over via quinjet.

Steve picked the nearest box, labeled 'bookshelf,' and sliced through the packing tape that held it closed. Inside, a small stuffed bear in a felt copy of his costume lay atop a stack of books, staring up at him with its black, plastic eyes. 'You have adopted Captain A-bear-ica,' read the paper tag attached to its left paw. It had appeared in his room one Valentines Day, with no card or note to tell him whom it had come from; Steve had always suspected Clint. Clint found any and all Captain America-themed merchandise hilarious, and probably owned every embarrassing and creepy attempt to make money off Steve's fame ever manufactured.

This particular attempt, though, Steve hadn't minded. He picked it up, smiling, and held it up for Tony to see. "I can't believe Jarvis kept this."

Tony eyed the little toy with a smirk. "I can't believe you kept it. I thought you hated all that Captain America merchandise they used to sell. Which you really ought to have gotten some sort of royalties for, by the way."

"I thought it was cute." Steve set the bear down on top of a still-closed box and inspected the books he'd been packed with. A half-dozen paperback fantasy novels, one of which he vaguely remembered reading just before the SHRA had been passed; he'd never finished it. A book on twentieth century labor history that he'd bought just after he and Tony had started the New Avengers, and had never gotten around to reading. Then the yellowed edge of a battered paperback with warped, water-damaged pages caught his eye, and he reached for it automatically, already knowing what it had to be.

Bucky had carried that copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn though half of France, and through Italy before that; it was probably a miracle that it was still readable, after all this time.

"I should give this back to Bucky," he said, carefully working it free from its spot between a Terry Pratchett novel and a leather bound copy of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. "It used to be his." The paper was soft, worn, and when he opened it, the pages still smelled like mildew and the mothballs the Army had packed it in, during the long decades he had spent in the ice.

The Army had given it back to Steve when he'd been unfrozen, tucked into the single cardboard box that had held all his remaining possessions. They had been carefully stored away in a government warehouse somewhere for "posterity," Bucky's things jumbled together with his own, because there'd been no next of kin to claim them when the two of them been reported dead. He'd barely touched it since then, afraid that if he handled it too much, it would start to fall apart.

"We don't even have a bookshelf in here yet." Tony's voice came from directly behind him, moments before his arms slid around Steve's waist. He rested the sharp point of his chin on Steve's shoulder, the edges of his goatee rasping against Steve's neck distractingly. "Leave those for later and come help me test if the bed is sturdy enough."

"It's sturdy," Steve told him. "We tested it very thoroughly."

"Yes, but that was two days ago. Materials can weaken over time." Tony hands moved downward, to the fly of Steve's jeans. "Metal fatigue builds up," he laid an open-mouthed kiss on the side of Steve's neck, mouth hot against Steve's skin, "wood warps..."

Steve turned in Tony's arms, his jeans already painfully tight, and settled his hands on Tony's hips, pulling Tony against him. "You're supposed to be helping me unpack," he said, sliding his fingers beneath the waistband of Tony's trousers and kneading at the dense curves of muscle in Tony's ass.

"We can do that later," Tony mumbled into the side of Steve's neck, and the vibrations of his voice against Steve's skin sent heat rushing down his body. "I have a business meeting in an hour, and D.C. keeps calling me about the mutant thing." He ground his hips against Steve's groin, his voice going low and rough, and Steve shuddered, gripping him harder. "Fury apparently told Koening and Gyrich to go do something anatomically impossible the last time they bothered him, and they think I'll have some kind of special insight into what SHIELD's going to do about it. Or that I'm still the government's pet superhero." Tony slid a hand into Steve's hair, turning his face toward his, and kissed him, slow and deep.

Steve broke the kiss, biting at Tony's lower lip just hard enough for him to feel it before he pulled away. "I can't imagine why they would think that." He took a few steps forward, nudging Tony ahead of him until the back of Tony's thighs were pressed against a stack of boxes; the entire stack would probably topple over if both of them rested their weight against it. "Try telling them no for once."

Tony's lips curved into a lopsided smile that only made the ache in Steve's body hotter and harder. His pupils were wide and dark, his lips parted slightly, and his hair was falling into his face, already disheveled from the effort of lugging boxes around. Someone else might have just looked sweaty and tired—Tony looked as if he'd just finished having hot, sweaty sex with someone, and was looking forward to having more. "When we bring out the next version of that stupid satellite phone," he said huskily, as Steve began unbuttoning his shirt, "the one with tablet capabilities that are going to put the Kindle out of business, and it sells millions of copies, I'm going to tell Koening what he can do with all those DoD contracts he's always threatening to take away from me."

Steve didn't point out that said DoD contracts involved work Tony sincerely enjoyed, and that he'd repeatedly heard him refer to the StarkPhone as "boring." He dropped to his knees, letting his hands slide down Tony's body, eliciting a very satisfying choked-off groan when he deliberately brushed them over the front of Tony's trousers, and looked up at Tony with a grin.

"You're lucky I like listening to you talk," he said. "I wonder how long you can keep it up."

Tony raised his eyebrows. "Is that a challenge?"

"What do you think?" Steve reached for Tony's zipper, deliberately taking as long as possible to pull it down and free Tony from the confines of pants and underwear.

"Pepper's always telling me to put together some kind of-" Tony broke off, gasping, then ground out, "some kind of prepared remarks for these meetings."

"Let's hear them then," Steve said. After that, he let Tony do all of the talking; his mouth was otherwise occupied.

Afterwards, the two of them sat side-by-side on the floor, their backs against the wall of boxes, shoulders touching.

"What does it take," Tony said, his breath still coming in slightly ragged gasps, "for you to get out of breath?"

Steve didn't answer, just leaned his head back against the boxes and enjoyed the afterglow. It was a rhetorical question, anyway. After a few minutes, when the energy began to slowly seep back into his limbs, he asked, "What have you told Washington about the mutant situation?"

Tony leaned his weight a little more heavily against Steve, his skin hot against Steve's bare shoulder. "That numerous mutants appear to have spontaneously regained their powers, and that they'll have to ask the X-Men if they want more detailed information. Even if I actually had a clue what was going on, I wouldn't tell them. Not now that I have a choice."

Around them, the contents of one of Steve's boxes of books lay scattered across the floor, the box itself lying on its side a few feet away. The bare wood of the floor was hard, still waiting to be covered by rugs, and the air smelled like new paint beneath the already-fading odor of sex.

The room itself looked like a slightly off-kilter copy of his old room at the Mansion – the layout was identical, and the walls and floor were the same down to the plaster moldings, but the bare walls and lack of furniture other than the bed rendered the room strange, unfamiliar. He'd be sharing it with Tony, now; Tony's old room at the mansion had been the smaller of the two, because he'd been just as likely to spend his time in various expensive apartments or at his company, where according to Pepper, he had sometimes slept on a cot in his work room.

Less than half a year ago, Steve had stood downstairs in the burned-out shell of this building and said goodbye to Tony for good. Having Tony right there next to him, sweaty and messy-haired and smelling like sex and expensive aftershave and hot metal, was a gift he still hadn't completely gotten used to.

"I've been keeping track of the news all day," Tony went on. "Nobody else has a clue what happened, either. If anyone at SHIELD does, they're being careful not to say so within reach of any electronic devices, and not to let anyone on the Helicarrier type the first syllable about it."

"Hank's running some tests on mutant blood chemistry for Beast," Steve offered. Despite the seriousness of the topic at hand, he couldn't keep a smile off his face; Tony worried about any phenomenon he couldn't explain and therefore have at least the illusion of control over, but watching news broadcasts of men and women weeping tears of joy over their returning powers was enough to make Steve willing to accept the mysterious return of the X-gene with only a few reservations.

What had caused it? Why had it only cured some of the mutants affected by M-Day? Was it permanent, or would the "cure" go away as abruptly as it had come? Everyone seemed to have some pet theory – Hank's working hypothesis was that it was magic, and he'd responded to Thor's automatic, "Nay, but what form of magic?" with a snarl of frustration, followed by a blank-faced look of surprise when he'd realized that Thor had actually addressed him directly. Unfortunately, that state of affairs had lasted only a few hours, until the surprise of M-Day's partial reversal had worn off, and Thor had swiftly gone back to pretending that Hank and Tony were not in the room.

Steve was going to have to do something about that, eventually, before the team's performance in the field suffered for it. He wasn't looking forward to it.

But the problems of trying to command a team when half the people on it weren't speaking to one another were nothing next to the miracle of having Thor back; between that and Clint's still-unexplained resurrection at Wanda's hands, Steve was beginning to understand why everyone had kept hugging him and hovering over him when he'd first... come back.

Tony was smiling as well, a small, satisfied curve of his lips that Steve suspected had little to do with their conversation and everything to do with good sex. "Whatever caused it, I'm glad it's happening now instead of two months ago. We'd never have gotten the SHRA repealed."

Steve shook his head slightly, refusing to let his good mood be spoiled by cynical thoughts about what might have been. "I hate politics," he said, without any real venom. "There doesn't always have to be a negative trade-off for good fortune. Sometimes people really do get a second chance."

He scooted slightly closer to Tony, wrapping an arm around his shoulders, and let the feel of Tony's body against his, warm and close and there, make his point for him.

Tony leaned his head against Steve's shoulder, sagging downward slightly against the boxes in order to do so, and closed his eyes, the smile still lingering on his lips. "Someday, I'm going to run out of those."

Steve's eyes went automatically to the smooth, unmarked skin of Tony's chest, though he knew that wasn't what Tony was referring to; they were both missing a lifetime's worth of scars, now, and while Steve occasionally missed the small imperfections he'd grown used to in his own appearance – the scar where he'd torn his knee falling off a fire escape as a child, the smallpox vaccination mark on his arm that no one who'd grown up in today's world had – he didn't miss Tony's scars at all. "No," he said, willing it to be true. "You won't."

There was at least a quarter of an hour until Tony had to leave for his meeting; Steve let himself soak in the sound of Tony's breathing, the press of his weight against him, and stared up at the blank, white walls around them, trying to envision them covered in paintings and photographs. All of his old art had vanished somewhere, but he could always draw more, and Jan would probably leap at the chance to look through a few art galleries and help find them something to cover all those barren walls. If he left it to Tony, they would either end up surrounded by images of the Avengers, or live in modernist sterility surrounded by ugly, angular furniture.

The floorboards beneath him were just beginning to become uncomfortably hard when Steve's Avengers communicator, lying out of the way atop a pile of boxes, came to life with a soft ping. Beside him, Tony went stiff, his shoulders jerking.

"It's Dr. Strange," he said, his voice strained. "He says that he has Wanda Maximoff with him. He says she wants to talk to us."

* * *

Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum was still disguised as a Starbucks, despite the fact that he wasn't trying to hide unregistered superheroes from the government anymore. Maybe he liked the privacy, or maybe it just amused him. You could never tell, with Strange.

Tony steeled himself inwardly as he, Steve, and Jan climbed the steps, almost wishing he'd worn his armor. The last time he'd seen Wanda, she had been completely beyond reasoning with, beyond help. And the Avengers had just let Strange hand her over to Magneto, nearly causing the end of the world through their carelessness.

They should have helped her, should have tried harder to get through to her. Should have noticed something was wrong before it was too late; by the end, whatever had been looking out of her eyes hadn't been Wanda anymore. The real Wanda, the woman Tony had been on a team with for years, would never have attempted to destroy an entire race of people.

Carol had insisted that it might be a trick, that they had no way of knowing whether or not Wanda was actually sane again, or had used her incredibly powerful chaos magic to influence Strange into thinking she was. She'd insisted on coming with them, as had Clint, but both of them were hanging back, following slowly behind the others as if they'd rather be anywhere else.

Steve, of course, was ready to believe that Wanda really was back, that Strange had somehow managed to find her and, miraculously, heal her. If he hadn't, he would do what he had to do, just as Tony would, but it would hurt him to have to treat Wanda as an enemy once more. All of them had spent far too much time fighting old friends.

Sooner or later, though, they were going to run out of miracles and good luck.

Tony resisted the urge to check the latches on his briefcase and reached for the door knocker.

The door swung inward before his fingers had even touched the polished brass, to reveal Strange, standing several steps back from the entrance. The narrow, Victorian hallway was dark, wreathing Strange in dramatic shadows; Tony suspected it was intentional.

"There are fewer of you than I expected," Strange said.

"We decided that the entire team would be a little too intimidating," Jan said, just as Clint said,

"Where is she? Is she all right? Does she know who she is again?"

Strange nodded, stepping aside and gesturing for them to enter the house. "Wanda has recovered her memories from before her possession by Chthon. She has no recollection of most of what occurred while she was under his control. She was unsure whether she ought to contact you, but there are things you need to know."

"She was possessed?" Steve's eyebrows shot up, and then his jaw tightened. "For how long?"

How long did we manage not to notice it, he meant.

Carol was still standing in the doorway, her arms folded across her chest. Tony put a hand on her arm, nudging her forward, and the door swung closed behind them, appearing to move of its own initiative.

As it fell shut, the string of emails from Pepper that Tony was mentally glancing over with a corner of his attention dissolved into static, as did the newsfeed full of reports on the mutant situation. He stiffened, and reached automatically for the armor, relaxing again when he was able to access it easily. Jan's cell phone was still detectible, too, searching futilely for a signal.

Every electronic signal coming from outside the house had been cut off.

"I wasn't able to determine that," Strange said, answering Steve's question. He grimaced slightly, clearly not pleased to have to admit to ignorance about something. "Wanda herself is unsure when he began influencing her."

"It's like that," Tony said. He was gripping the handle of his briefcase hard enough that his fingers were starting to hurt, he realized. He made himself loosen his grasp, and tried one more time to access one of the cut-off datafeeds. Once again, no luck. "You can't tell, afterwards, how much of it was the mind control and how much was you." Or at least, he hadn't been able to tell, when Immortus had been influencing him. When the Extremis had been hacked, his memory had been wiped after every instance of mind-control, leaving him with large blocks of missing time, and Ultron's mind-control had worked the same way. But with Immortus...

He remembered far too much of that.

"I could tell," Carol said, her voice flat. "Afterwards, anyway. Even when it was happening, I knew something was wrong. I just couldn't do anything about it."

Steve was still frowning, and Tony wasn't sure if the stiff set of his shoulders was due to Wanda's situation, or the reminder of what Marcus had done to Carol, when he'd used mind-control to seduce her into leaving the team and traveling to another dimension with him. And to make her think she'd fallen in love with him.

"How did she break free?" Steve asked.

"When she reached New York, proximity to the Spear of Loki in Hell's Kitchen disrupted Chthon's control over her. She came to me, and I was able to place magical shields on her to prevent him from reasserting control." Strange stopped in front of a heavy, wooden door, pushing it open with one hand and waving them inside with the other. "I believe I will let Miss Maximoff explain the rest."

Wanda was standing at the far end of Strange's study, her back to the door, staring out the huge, round window that dominated the room. Wong was standing next to her, the two of them deep in conversation.

"—not entirely sure how to accomplish that," he was saying. "Stephen's always been able to ignore those little details. You weren't officially declared dead, and the police and SHIELD didn't really understand what happened in the first place, so there have been no legal charges, so your assets should still be in your name." He nodded at the doorway, and added, gently, "Your teammates are here."

Wanda turned, her face expressionless. She was wearing a conservative skirt and blouse in subdued colors, and her face looked drawn and pale with exhaustion. She straightened her shoulders and faced them unflinchingly. "Clint," she said. "Steve, Carol. I'm... I'm glad you came. All of you." Her voice wavered on the last word, but her face and posture didn't change.

The last time Tony had seen her, she had been hovering in mid-air, surrounded by the hectic red light of chaos magic. Now she looked... normal. For months he'd been inwardly dreading the necessity of having to deal with her one day, amnesia and supposedly vanished powers or not, and coming face to face with her now felt strangely anti-climatic. No potentially world-destroying showdown, no lives at risk, no need to make any impossible choices.

"Wanda," Clint blurted out. "You remember me now. I mean, you look... are you okay?"

She looked away, one hand crumpling the fabric of her skirt. There was something dark on the back of it, but Tony wasn't close enough to make out the details. "I'm... I will be. I hope."

"Scarlet Witch," Steve cut in, voice controlled. It was his Captain America, I-am-in-charge-here voice, despite the fact that none of them were in costume. "It's good to see you yourself again."

There was a long moment of silence. Jan smiled tentatively, Clint looked at the floor, and Carol glowered at Wanda and everyone else, pointedly silent. Tony stood there feeling awkward, watching Steve and Wanda try to smile at one another, and struggled to think of something to say. 'I'm sorry we never noticed that you were under mind-control', maybe, or 'I'm sorry we didn't help you when you needed it.' Both seemed trite.

There were some things that apologies never seemed to work for.

Then Wanda's stiff, tremulous smile widened into a real one, and her eyes started to shine with what looked suspiciously like unshed tears. "I heard that you were dead," she said. "I'm so glad you're back. I wish I'd been here to help, when it happened."

Tony felt a sudden surge of relief that she hadn't been, that he'd been spared fighting and trying to imprison at least one of his old teammates, and then instantly felt guilty. She hadn't been there during Registration because she'd been off in Transia with Chthon doing God only knew what with her mind and body.

Chthon could have done anything to her, during the long year when Tony had preferred to ignore her existence because he didn't want to deal with it. Used her to kill, warping her powers and will into a weapon the way he had on M-Day. Influenced her thoughts, planted suggestions and commands in her brain...

They wouldn't be able to trust her, anymore. She wouldn't be able to trust herself.

Tony knew that feeling intimately, had known it long before Registration had forced him to sell out. It was part of why he'd been willing to try and work with HUSAC and Superhuman Registration in the first place, why he'd gone along with Dickstein and Koening and Gyrich and all the others, and not just because Koening and Dickstein had used the things he'd done when the Extremis had been hacked to blackmail him.

When superheroes couldn't trust themselves, it was impossible to expect the public to trust them, especially after disasters like Stamford. Proving they were safe, non-threatening, willing to follow the rules... had not been a very good solution, but it had been better than proving everyone's fears right would have been. Had been.

He'd come so close to falling off the wagon during the Registration fight, closer than anyone knew. Part of him had wanted to – it would have been so much easier to just stop fighting, and he'd already thrown away nearly every good thing he'd once had. It was different now. Now he had a lot more to lose. In some ways, that made it harder.

Steve rubbed at the back of his neck, the motion awkward and jerky. "I'm glad to be back," he said. "But we have some questions we need to ask you and Dr. Strange."

"Starting with how we can be sure Chthon's influence is truly gone." The words felt stiff in Tony's mouth, accusatory. The last thing Wanda probably needed right now was more blame, not when she knew very well what Chthon had used her to do, and what it had cost them all – Vision, Scott Lang, Clint, until his unexplained return, very nearly the team itself – but it had to be said.

Wanda took a few steps closer to the rest of them and held up her hands, palms facing inwards. The dark markings Tony had noticed earlier were tattoos, circular designs that looked like the circles magic users like Doom sometimes used to summon demons and other entities bent on destroying the world. Black, angular writing wrapped around the edge and wove through the design, in a script Tony didn't recognize, though he thought he saw a few alchemical symbols worked into it at strategic points.

"These seal me away from Chthon's power. As long as I wear them, he can't touch me unless I break the barrier between us myself."

"Which we're supposed to just trust you not to do?" Carol's voice was acid. "The way Vision trusted you? The way She-Hulk and Tony did? And Clint?"

Wanda shook her head, rubbing at the tattoo on her left hand. "No. You don't have to trust me. I'm not asking to come back to the team. Not now. Not after-" she stopped, swallowing, and continued. "I know I can't apologize or go back. I wanted to warn you."

So that they would be prepared if she lost control again, Tony thought. It was what he would have done, what Steve had refused to let him do after the disaster with the fear toxin last month.

The Wanda spoke again, and proved his assessment completely wrong. "Chthon is trying to free himself from his prison and return to this dimension. That's why he sent me here."

It was probably a sign of how bad the past year had been that Tony didn't even feel surprise. Of course Wanda's return to New York was part of a demonic plot. Nothing good came without strings attached.

He heard Steve swear, so quietly that only Tony, standing right next to him, would be able to hear it, and revised the thought. Almost nothing good came without strings.

"To do what?" Jan asked, taking a step forward. Her chin was raised, and her arms folded casually across her chest, but she looked at ease, in control, her calm even more impressive against the backdrop of Carol's sullen anger and Clint's obvious unease.

He wasn't even looking at Wanda, as if the mere sight of her was painful. Maybe it was, after what had happened between them on Mount Wundagore.

"To remake the earth in his own image, preferably killing or enslaving everyone on it in the process." Wong said the words with faint disgust, as if he'd encountered entities like Chthon far too many times to be impressed by them any longer. "Unfortunately, he's powerful enough to do it."

"Considering the amount of influence he's able to exert on the world while still imprisoned..." Strange let the sentence trail off, the pause lingering ominously. "He intended to use Wanda to obtain the chaos power stored within Baldur's Bane, which would increase the powers at his disposal just enough for him to breach the walls of his prison. Once free, he would be undefeatable, especially with Loki's power added to his own."

Tony narrowed his eyes. "You said you'd sealed the spear away."

"From Doom and other sorcerers who seek its power for selfish ends." Strange gestured at Wanda, as if the answer ought to have been obvious. For him, it probably was. "Wanda was seeking it for Chthon's ends, not her own."

"There's always a loophole," Clint said, bitterly. "I hate demons."

"So do I," Tony muttered.

"So you see," Wanda was saying, her voice measured and careful, "I can't leave until Chthon has been stopped. And I can't fight him alone, not without using his own power to strengthen mine. And if I do that, he'll have me again. I can understand if you don't want to help me, but you needed to know-"

"Of course we'll help," Steve said firmly, as if the Avengers had already discussed the situation and come to a unanimous conclusion.

Wanda's face crumpled with relief for a moment, and then she looked away. "Thank you," she said quietly.

Jan put a hand on her arm. "Everything you've done – everything Chthon made you do – can be dealt with later. This is more important."

"Well, obviously, but..." Carol shook her head sharply, then turned to Strange. "Why can't you do it?" she asked bluntly.

Strange spread his hands. "Even the power of the Sorcerer Supreme pales beside that of an elder god. I, too, would not be able to accomplish the task alone. I have faced Chthon before, but never at his full power."

She narrowed her eyes. "I thought you were infallible and nearly omnipotent."

"Only nearly. Sorry to have disappointed you."

"I agree with Jan," Clint said quickly. "We can talk about everything else later."

Steve caught Tony's gaze, eyebrows raised in a silent question.

"All for one, and one for all," Tony agreed. He meant for it to sound light, upbeat, but the words came out sounding grim.

Good intentions and a common enemy had gone a little way toward repairing the shattered remnants of their team before, but that had been as much luck as anything else, Steve granting forgiveness to Tony almost completely unearned, and the rest of the superhero community grudgingly following his lead. Even now, the breach still hadn't completely healed, something Thor's pointed absence from today's visit made all too obvious. Tony had come, so of course, Thor hadn't.

They might not be able to repair things this time, not when they had wronged Wanda far more deeply than anyone in the superhero community had ever wronged Tony or Hank during the Registration fight – they'd been acting of their own free will. Even if the entire team and the superhero community at large were prepared to forgive her, something he'd bet money most of the world's mutant population was never going to do, she might not be able to forgive them.

And Chthon would be able to take advantage of that.

* * *

"She's been sane for what, two days?" Sam shook his head, frowning. "What if Chthon planted some kind of trigger, made her a sleeper agent? She could be following his orders without even realizing it."

"Exactly." Hank pointed a finger at Sam. "We need her where we can keep an eye on her."

"That's not actually what I was saying." On Sam's shoulder, Redwing cocked his head and eyed Hank's finger threateningly.

Jan had never been able to bring herself to like birds. They were pretty, yes, but their cold reptilian eyes and scaly feet had been off-putting even before the first three times she'd almost been eaten by one. Sam's pet was no exception – he looked at her as if he knew that she could shrink down to the size of something edible and was merely waiting until Sam turned his back during a fight in order to grab a crunchy, Wasp-shaped snack.

She had clearly been spending too much time around Hank lately, if she was starting to come up with her own paranoid worries; with matters on the team as they stood, Hank was spending a lot of time hiding in the Tower's lab, and it was never good when Hank spent days in a lab completely unsupervised. He forgot to shower, for one thing.

"We already agreed to help Wanda," Jan reminded everyone, resisting the impulse to get up and pace. She sacrificed some of her authority as chairwoman when she shrank down to six inches tall and paced back and forth across the table, but it always helped her think. "Stopping Chthon from breaking free is-"

"You mean Cap agreed to help her," Carol interrupted.

"He's right." Tony's metal faceplate was expressionless, as always, but even through the helmet's voice filters, he sounded stubbornly uncompromising. "We owe her. She wouldn't have ended up in this situation at all if we'd noticed what was going on sooner."

"Well, no, but..." Hank waved a hand, visibly struggling for words. "She nearly destroyed the world. She's incredibly powerful. Incredibly powerful and unstable, and that means she's incredibly dangerous. She killed Scott. And Vision. Maybe she didn't mean to, but they're still dead."

Dead like Steve had been. Dead like Bill Foster. The words hung in the air, no one needing to say them. Hank, she knew, could hear them anyway; he dropped his gaze to the tabletop, and fell silent.

Steve folded his arms across his chest, his jaw tilting at a familiar angle. "If Strange is right, that wasn't actually her. And I don't see any reason why we should doubt him."

Thor had been silent throughout the meeting – the argument, really – and when he spoke, it was almost startling. "If the Scarlet Witch was truly forced to do these terrible deeds against her will, then it would be wrong of us to blame her for them."

He had no problem blaming Hank and Tony for cloning him without his knowledge, Jan thought, or for the destruction said clone had caused, despite the fact that neither of them had been acting of their own free will, either. She couldn't blame him – it had been a horrible violation, and the cost... Dickstein's committee had forced Hank's hands, but assigning the blame where it was due still wasn't going to bring Bill back.

She'd left Hank and been prepared to leave the pro-registration side and her life as a superhero after Bill Foster's death, but she also knew how much Hank regretted it, and couldn't help feeling defensive of him. She didn't want to be angry at Thor, not when just seeing him sitting across the table from her still made her want to hug him in thanks that he was alive. He was right. What Hank had done had been terrible. Still...

How did Steve manage to be completely sympathetic to both Thor and Tony, to avoid obviously picking a side? He was a better person, a better leader, than she was – Jan could never manage that degree of impartiality where Hank was concerned. Even when he'd hurt her, leaving him had been almost as difficult as staying would have been.

Thor wasn't the one who had to try and get Hank out of bed in the morning. Steve either.

Clint, surprisingly, nodded. "The big guy's right," he said. "If she was possessed, it's not her fault. Nothing she did was her fault."

"She still did it," Carol snapped, glaring at him. "How can you defend her, after what she did to you? She could do it again at any time, the moment she uses enough magic to fry Strange's seals and lets Chthon back into her head."

Clint looked away, his hands still on the table-top.

"It wouldn't even have to be her fault," Sam repeated. "Like I said, he could have planted suggestions in her head."

Steve sighed. "If we kicked everyone off the team who might potentially have had a supervillain planting suggestions in their head, the only people left at this table would be Jan and Thor."

"Nay, the Enchantress hypnotized me once."

"All right, just Jan, then."

"Not after last month," Jan countered. "We all know there are no guarantees in this business. If Chthon truly is on the verge of breaking free, arguing about whether or not we can trust Wanda's information is a waste of time. Strange has already vouched for her, and if we can't trust his word, then we might as well throw our hands up and give up now."

"So we're just supposed to trust her not to use too much magic and burn through the seals?" Carol's voice dripped with scorn. Jan was tempted to point out that half the former anti-Registration superheroes had been equally unwilling to trust Carol, but that would have been petty, and wouldn't accomplish anything.

"Yes," she said. "Yes, we're supposed to trust her. The way we trust Hank to take his medication, and Tony not to start drinking again, or erase our checking accounts with the Extremis just because he can, or Steve not to kill somebody practicing unarmed combat moves. Or Sam and Clint not to..." she trailed off, unable to think of anything potentially threatening about Clint, or any way Sam could possibly misuse the ability to talk to birds.

Hank flushed, his face tightening with a familiar look of discomfort. She could almost hear him saying, 'Don't embarrass me in public, Jan,' in tones that would once have been an annoyed snarl and now were usually just resigned, but there were times when they had to stop tiptoeing around the truth. And the truth was that all of them had the potential to be incredibly dangerous under the wrong circumstances. It wasn't as if having to keep a watchful eye on a teammate was a new concept.

"I could do much better than just erase your checking accounts," Tony said, after a long moment of silence.

"This meeting is not a place for levity," Thor said stiffly, neither looking at Tony nor directly addressing him. "Trust must be earned, and is all too easily betrayed. But by all we have heard, the Scarlet Witch is, methinks, innocent of any such betrayal. And Chthon is a terrible enemy; none of the gods of Asgard have powers to equal his. My vote is that we accept her help."

Steve nodded. "Mine as well." No surprise there; he hadn't hesitated for so much as a moment at Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum before offering his – their – help.

"I agree with Cap-" Tony started.

"Oh, there's a surprise," Carol muttered. "I vote no."

She probably ought to vote no as well, Jan knew. Keeping a watchful eye on a teammate, trusting them to do the right thing, to use their powers wisely, was something they all did every day, but after a disaster as complete as Wanda's possession-driven breakdown, it would be foolish to just let her walk back onto the team without proving herself. She had kicked Hank off the team for a reason, all those years ago, and it hadn't been because he'd given her a black eye – he'd come within inches of getting the rest of them killed. They hadn't been able to trust his judgment, any more than they'd been able to trust Tony's judgment when he'd been drinking, though he'd thankfully taken himself off the team of his own volition before Jan or Steve had had to do it for him. Carol, too, had needed to be stricken from the Avengers roster when she'd been drinking, and it had taken more than simply her insistence that she was fine, afterwards, for Steve to agree to let her back on.

She ought to vote no. But the fact remained that Chthon was too powerful for them to face without Wanda's magic at their disposal. Strange had admitted that touching the spear and accessing its power was beyond him, that channeling pure chaos power would drive almost any magic user other than Wanda insane. "We need her," she said. "I vote yes. But not as an Avenger. Not until we can be sure she's really okay."

It had nothing to do with Hank and Tony, she told herself. She wasn't rushing to forgive Wanda because she felt obligated to give the other woman a second chance after being so quick to come back to the pro-Registration side despite Bill's death, despite how uneasy HUSAC's actions and the Fifty State Initiative had made her.

Hank cleared his throat. "I say yes, too. We need her where we can stop her, if something goes wrong."

"Falcon?" Steve asked.

Sam shook his head. "I vote no. There's too much we can't be sure of, especially this soon."

"Hawkeye?"

Clint shrugged one shoulder, his eyes on the table top. "I don't know. I- Can I abstain?"

Jan frowned. Clint's vote wasn't the deciding factor at this point, not with five votes for and two against, but she had expected him to have strong feelings one way or the other. He had known Wanda longer than any of them except Steve, and he had been the one to find her in Transia. He was the one she had killed, then raised from the dead.

And it wasn't like Clint not to have an opinion on a decision as important as this, usually a loud opinion.

"Are you sure?" Steve asked Clint, his eyebrows raised in surprise. "If anyone has the right to object to working with her, it's-"

"I'm sure," Clint interrupted. "She brought me back from the dead. And then I-" he broke off, looking uncomfortable. "I don't know. I don't think I can make a rational decision here."

"Who gets to bring her in here to hear the verdict?" Hank asked.

"No one." Tony held up one gauntleted hand. "You remember what it's like. She had no choice in any of this, and we're not going to haul her up in front of all eight of us to make her listen to us pass judgment on her. Making her wait in the hall is bad enough." He turned to Steve, the motion making light glint off his polished faceplate. "Send somebody out there to tell her what our decision is."

"That's... a good idea actually." Steve frowned slightly, his mask crinkling over his eyebrows. "Is that really what it's like?"

Carol sighed, pushing her hair out of her face with one hand. "No," she said. "Tony's actually downplaying how nerve-wracking having everyone sit in judgment of you is."

Steve rubbed his hands together, glancing at the door, then stood. "I'll tell her, then. We can discuss how we're going to make this work later. And it is going to work," he added, casting a stern look over the entire table.

Jan watched him stride toward the door, resisting the impulse to rub at her temples. Steve clung fondly to the belief that he could make things turn out the way he wanted them to by sheer force of will. It was endearing, most of the time, but sometimes...

Problems didn't go away just because you wanted them to. Eventually, you always had to accept that they were there, and deal with them.

* * *

This chapter is... really late, yeah. Sorry about that, guys. Between Christmas, Yuletide, New Years, trying to close on an apartment, and NYC's snowpocalypse, we've been distracted. Um, but this chapter has PG-13 fade-to-black sex?

Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six | Chapter Seven Part One | Chapter Seven Part Two | Chapter Eight | Chapter Nine | Chapter Ten Part One | Chapter Ten Part Two | Chapter Eleven