Chapter 3: The Tease
The scent of roses and ozone clung to Wanda’s coat as she materialized in the private landing bay of Avengers Tower. The transition was jarring. One second, the taste of Lisa’s skin was on her tongue, the feel of her slept-in warmth a phantom pressure against her chest. The next, the sterile, recycled air of the bay filled her lungs, smelling of metal, ionized particles, and Stark’s overpriced floor cleaner.
Her body hummed with a strange, new dichotomy. There was a deep, liquid soreness between her legs, a pleasant ache in muscles she hadn’t consciously used. And over that, thrumming just beneath her skin, was her power. It felt different. Sharper, yet more contained. Like a storm that had finally found its eye.
She smoothed her hands down the front of her coat, a futile gesture. She couldn’t smooth away the marks Lisa’s mouth had left on her breasts, or the memory of the bruises on Lisa’s hips under her tender fingers. Dance for me. The words were a secret loop in her mind.
“Cutting it close, Maximoff.”
Natasha Romanoff leaned against the doorway leading to the interior, ankles crossed, a tablet tucked under her arm. Her expression was unreadable, but a faint, knowing smile played at the corners of her mouth.
“The quinjet leaves in forty minutes,” Wanda said, her voice even. She walked past Natasha, expecting her to fall into step.
“Uh-huh.” Natasha pushed off the wall and matched her pace. The click of her boots echoed in the polished corridor. “Manila’s nice this time of year. Hot. Humid. Perfect for fighting interdimensional sludge.”
“I’ll pack light.”
They rode the elevator in silence. Wanda watched the floors flash by. Natasha examined her nails.
“She’s cute.”
Wanda’s head snapped towards her. “What?”
Natasha didn’t look up. “Your pop star. Lalisa Manoban. Lisa. Cute. Killer dancer. Seems sweet in interviews.” She finally met Wanda’s gaze, her green eyes glinting with amusement. “Next time, maybe close the curtains before you do your magical girl transformation sequence. I had to enhance the hotel’s external security feed three times to be sure it was you.”
A cold flush, equal parts violation and sheer embarrassment, washed over Wanda. “You were surveilling me?”
“Please.” The elevator dinged, opening into the common floor. “I wasn’t. But you know the boys get bored.”
The common area was a panorama of New York, all sleek lines and casual, astronomically expensive furniture. And it was full.
Steve Rogers stood by the coffee machine, looking solemn and captain-like. Sam Wilson was on a treadmill that had somehow rolled in from the gym, still running. Bruce Banner was peering at a holographic model of a DNA helix, muttering to himself. And Tony Stark was perched on the back of a sofa, a bowl of blueberries in hand, a shit-eating grin plastered across his face.
All conversation died as Wanda entered.
Tony was the first to break the silence. He popped a blueberry. “So. Seoul. How was the… hospitality?”
Bruce ducked his head, pretending to be engrossed in his helix.
Steve turned from the machine, a mug in his hand. “Wanda. Glad you’re back. We have the briefing packet ready.” His voice was neutral, but his eyes held a glint of something that wasn’t quite professional curiosity.
Sam slowed the treadmill to a walk, wiping his face with a towel. “Yeah, we were just discussing the, uh, strategic advantages of a balcony entrance. Low visibility, high impact. Classic.”
Wanda felt her cheeks burn. Chaos magic prickled at her fingertips. She could feel it, the low-grade surveillance tech in the room, the invisible eyes of Jarvis or Friday. Of course. The hotel’s security. Hacked. They’d seen her flight in. Her dramatic, crimson-lit arrival at Lisa’s window. The thought of what else their algorithms might have flagged, what snippets of audio or blurred thermal imaging they might have compiled, made her want to fold the entire tower inside out.
“You hacked a private hotel room,” she said, her voice dangerously quiet.
Tony held up his hands. “In our defense, it was a slow Tuesday. Also, in our defense, Brucie-bear and I have a standing bet on your… preferred methods of decompression. He thought you’d just go brood on a mountain somewhere. I had more faith in your imagination.”
Bruce shrugged, not looking up. “The telekinetic manifestation of complex biological structures was… computationally fascinating. The energy signature alone was—”
“Dude,” Sam cut him off, laughing. “We don’t need the sci-fi breakdown. We all saw the movie.”
“It wasn’t a movie,” Wanda snapped, the air around her shimmering slightly. “It was a private moment.”
“Hey,” Steve said, setting the mug down. His tone shifted, the teasing softening into something more genuine. “Wanda. Take a breath.”
She glared at him. He held her gaze, steady.
“We saw,” he said simply. “We saw you fly in. We saw you, later, carrying her to the bed. We saw you just… holding her while she slept.” He paused. The room grew still. Sam stepped off the treadmill. Even Tony’s grin faded a touch. “After everything… after Vision, after Westview…” Steve seemed to search for the right words, the soldier struggling with something tender. “We know what you’ve lost. We know the weight you carry. Seeing you like that… just holding someone, letting someone sleep on you… it was…”
“Heartwarming,” Natasha finished quietly, from her spot by the elevator. She wasn’t smiling anymore. Her expression was open, almost gentle. “It was good to see, sestra.”
The fight drained out of Wanda, leaving her exposed. The humiliation morphed into something else, something more vulnerable. They hadn’t just seen the sex, the power. They’d seen the after. The washing. The cradling. The quiet surrender of her watchfulness until morning. They’d seen her be soft.
Tony cleared his throat, uncharacteristically awkward. “Look, no one’s judging the midnight pegasus ride, Red. The opposite, actually. The repulsors get lonely.” He gestured vaguely. “We’re just… glad you’re back. And that you didn’t, you know, accidentally rewrite the laws of physics in a five-star hotel. Publicly.”
Bruce finally looked at her, offering a shy, kind smile. “The calming harmonic you generated in the bathwater… it was beautiful. A non-invasive neural soothe. I’d love to see the wave-form sometime, if you… you know. Wanted.”
A small, unexpected laugh escaped Wanda. It felt strange in her throat. She looked around at their faces—Steve’s earnest warmth, Natasha’s quiet approval, Sam’s amused support, Bruce’s scientific awe, even Tony’s deflective care packaged as ribbing. They were her family. A messed-up, fragmented, overwhelming family. And they’d been watching, not just as voyeurs, but as worried siblings.
“You are all impossible,” she said, the tension finally leaving her shoulders.
“Yeah, but you love us,” Sam said, grabbing his water bottle.
Steve picked up the coffee mug and walked over, handing it to her. “For the jet. It’s going to be a long flight.” His eyes held hers. “And for what it’s worth… I’m happy for you.”
Wanda took the mug, the heat seeping into her hands. She nodded, unable to speak around the sudden tightness in her chest. The memory of Lisa’s smile, the dance for me, now lived alongside this: the gentle, teasing warmth of a team that had seen her at her most broken, and now, had glimpsed her beginning, tentatively, to feel something whole.
“Okay,” Tony clapped his hands, breaking the moment. “Enough group therapy. Manila’s waiting. And Romanoff, next time you enhance footage, the least you could do is add some popcorn.”
The smile faded from Wanda’s lips as Steve moved to the holotable. The playful ambiance snapped into a familiar, focused tension. Screens flickered to life, projecting satellite imagery over Manila and dense streams of encrypted financial data. Natasha took up a position beside Steve, her posture all business now.
“The incursion’s a symptom, not the cause,” Steve began, zooming in on a shimmering distortion near the city’s port. “Reality is thinning there, but it’s being actively pulled. Something’s using a massive amount of energy to try and peel a corner of our dimension back.”
Tony flippantly tossed a blueberry into the air and caught it in his mouth. “Great. A cosmic band-aid rip. My favorite.”
“The energy signature is artificial,” Bruce supplied, manipulating the hologram to display a cascading chemical formula. “It requires a compound called Cavalium. It’s theoretical. Hyper-stable, hyper-expensive. You’d need a particle collider the size of a city block and the GDP of a small nation to synthesize even a gram.”
“So who’s writing the checks?” Sam asked, leaning on the table.
Natasha tapped her tablet. The financial data stream crystallized into a web of shell companies, a Russian doll of holdings that made Wanda’s head hurt. At the very center, the filings crystallized into a single, iconic name: LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton. The corporate parent. And above it, the principle shareholder.
“Bernard Arnault,” Natasha said, the name dropping like a stone. “The wealthiest man in the world. He owns the portfolio. Chanel, Dior, Celine, Tiffany. A thousand others. He’s the quiet king.”
Steve’s jaw tightened. “Our intel suggests he’s not just collecting handbags. He’s been buying in the underworld for a decade. Weapons labs. Biochemical research. Metaphysical acquisitions on the black market. He’s building something, and the Manila event is a field test.”
Wanda listened, her mind partitioning. The Scarlet Witch processed the tactical data, the magical ramifications of a stabilized reality tear. But another part, the woman who had just left a warm bed, felt a cold, creeping unease.
“He’s elderly. Reclusive,” Natasha continued, swiping to a new file. “He doesn’t get his hands dirty. The operation, the execution, all of it flows through one conduit.” A photograph filled the screen.
A man in his early thirties, handsome in a severe, calculated way. Perfectly tailored suit, sharp eyes that held no warmth. It was a paparazzi shot from a fashion week, but he looked directly at the camera as if assessing a threat.
“Frédéric Arnault,” Natasha said. “The son. The heir. He runs the watch division, but that’s just the public face. Our trace shows he’s the operational head of all his father’s special projects. He’s the one on the ground. He’s the one in Manila.”
The name hit Wanda with the force of a physical blow.
Her blood seemed to stall, then crash coldly back through her veins. The sterile air of the tower vanished. She was back in the hotel bathroom, Lisa smiling up at her, talking about her week in Paris. 'I had the most boring fitting with Frédéric Arnault for the new campaign. All he talks about is market saturation and geodesic synchronicity. Pretty, but like a robot.'
She must have made a sound. A tiny, punched-out breath.
All eyes turned to her. The room’s focus narrowed to the sudden, palpable shock radiating from her.
“Wanda?” Steve asked, his voice low.
“She knows him,” Wanda heard herself say. The words felt distant. “Lisa. She’s worked with him. She…”
She couldn’t finish. The contrast was monstrous. The man whose commands had likely created the screaming, unstable rift in Manila, the man procuring nightmare fuel for his father’s ambitions, was the same man who had stood in a sunlit Parisian atelier while Lisa laughed in a gown. He had been in the same room as that vibrant, trusting energy. He had discussed market saturation with her.
Natasha’s gaze sharpened, instantly recalibrating. “How close?”
“Professional. A campaign.” Wanda’s hands curled into fists at her sides, her nails biting into her palms. The comforting soreness in her body now felt like a terrible vulnerability. “She thought he was boring.”
A heavy silence blanketed the room. The personal had violently intersected with the global. Tony stopped fiddling with his blueberries. Bruce’s hologram spun silently.
“We don’t know what the Arnaults’ endgame is,” Steve finally said, his voice grave. “The Manila tear could be a test for a weapon, a door, or something else. But if Frédéric is there personally, it’s critical.”
Sam whistled low. “So the mission just got a lot more complicated.”
Wanda looked from the卫星图像of the weeping reality tear to the cold, handsome face of Frédéric Arnault. Her mind did not shatter. It crystallized. The warmth, the softness, the peace of the morning—it wasn’t gone. It was the precise reason the cold fury now settling in her bones was so absolute.
Lisa was her secret. Her quiet place. And this man, this hollow, executing son, existed in her orbit. He was a threat he didn’t even know he’d made.
“The complication is mine to manage,” Wanda said, her voice dropping into a register that made the lights above them flicker. The chaotic gleam was back in her eyes, but it was focused, coldly directed. “Brief me on the Cavalium extraction point. I want to know how he moves it.”
She stepped closer to the holotable, her reflection a ghostly scarlet shimmer over Manila’s map. The file on Frédéric Arnault was still open, his photograph a silent challenge.
She would go to Manila. She would seal the rift. And she would learn exactly what the Arnault family was building, thread by catastrophic thread. For the world, yes. But also, privately, fiercely, for the woman who was currently probably stretching in a Seoul dance studio, utterly unaware that the axis of Wanda’s world had just tilted violently in her defense.
Natasha handed her a data chip, their fingers brushing. “Everything we have on him is on there. Business, travel, suspected black-site locations.”
Wanda took it. It was cool against her skin. “Thank you.”
She turned and walked towards the quinjet bay, the memory of Lisa’s sleeping face and the image of Frédéric Arnault’s ruthless eyes burning side-by-side in her mind, a potent and dangerous fuel.
The hum of the quinjet’s engines was a dull, pervasive thing that vibrated up through the soles of Wanda’s boots. She stared at the data stream scrolling on a holoscreen, Manila’s port schematic rotating slowly. The Cavalium extraction point glowed a toxic green. Her mind, however, was a split screen.
One half tracked thermal signatures and structural weak points. The other replayed Lisa’s voice, light and annoyed. Pretty, but like a robot. She saw the man’s photo from the dossier superimposed over Lisa’s smiling, post-coffee selfies she’d secretly glanced at that morning. The violation was intimate, curdling in her gut.
“You’re grinding your teeth,” Natasha said, not looking up from her own screen. She was running diagnostics on a pair of Widow’s Bites. “You’ll need those molars for eating whatever questionable rations Stark packed.”
“I am focusing,” Wanda replied, her voice tight.
“You’re brooding. It’s different.” Natasha snapped a cartridge into place with a decisive click. “Brooding is inefficient. Talk it through. The objective is clear: plug the hole, grab the Cavalium source, get a read on Frédéric’s playbook. Your personal stake just sharpens the edge.”
Wanda finally looked away from the screen. The jet’s interior was all cool, shadowed metal, but for a moment she smelled jasmine and sweat. “She is irrelevant to the mission parameters.”
“Bullshit.” Natasha leaned back, crossing her arms. “Nothing about you is irrelevant. That’s your problem and your power. So use it. That anger you’re sitting on? Don’t let it fog the lens. Aim it.”
The jet lurched slightly, beginning its descent. The pilot’s voice, cool and automated, announced their approach through a bank of unnatural storm clouds surrounding the incursion zone. Wanda stood, the harness retracting. Her coat, still faintly scented from Seoul, felt like a second skin. She closed her eyes, reaching out with her senses.
The reality tear wasn’t a clean cut. It was a suppurating wound. She felt it before she saw it: a psychic wail of wrongness, a visceral nausea woven into the air itself. It tasted of copper and static. Below, the port was a scar of chaos. Shipping containers were twisted into impossible polyhedrons, glowing with that same sickly green. The air shimmered like a heat haze, and through it, she glimpsed fragments of other places—a jagged purple cliff face, a swirling nebula—stitched clumsily onto the Manila docks.
“Showtime,” Natasha murmured, moving to the deploy bay.
Rain, thick and warm, sheeted across the opening ramp. The smell hit them next: brine, diesel, and beneath it, the ozone-stink of unraveling physics. They dropped onto a gantry overlooking the primary site. Figures moved in the distorted light below—not demons or aliens, but men in sleek tactical gear, overseeing the transfer of canisters from a stabilized section of the tear into a fortified truck.
“Private army,” Natasha noted, her voice barely audible over the screeching wind. “Expensive kit. That’s our Cavalium.”
And there, beside the truck, was Frédéric Arnault. He looked exactly like his photo, impervious to the chaotic rain, consulting a data pad. He pointed with a calm, precise gesture. A soldier nodded and rushed off.
Wanda watched him. The cold fury in her solidified into something calm and surgical. Market saturation and geodesic synchronicity. This was his real product. Tears in the world.
“I’ll handle the ground team,” Natasha said, already gauging her grapple points. “You close the door. And maybe have a chat with our friend.”
Wanda didn’t answer. She stepped off the gantry.
She didn’t fall. Crimson energy swirled at her feet, holding her aloft as she descended through the lashing rain. The soldiers saw her first. Shouts erupted, weapons swinging up. Energy bolts, a familiar cerulean blue from Chitauri-based tech, seared toward her.
She flicked a wrist. The bolts disintegrated into harmless sparks. Another gesture, and the two men who fired them were lifted and thrown silently into a stack of normal, non-geometric containers. They hit with a dull crunch and didn’t move.
Chaos erupted below. Natasha was already a blur of motion at the periphery, her bites crackling. Wanda landed softly between Arnault and the glowing rift. The raw scream of it was a physical pressure against her skin, tugging at the edges of her own power.
Frédéric Arnault looked up from his data pad. His eyes, those calculated eyes, widened for only a fraction of a second. Then they narrowed, assessing. He didn’t look afraid. He looked intrigued.
“The Scarlet Witch,” he said, his voice clipped, clear even over the din. “An unexpected variable. Your energy signature wasn’t projected to intersect with this test for another seven hours.”
“I finished early,” Wanda said. She took a step forward. The green-tinged light from the tear painted her face in ghastly strokes. “You’re making a mess.”
“We’re making a new market.” He didn’t retreat. He tapped his pad. “The applied stabilization of localized reality fractures has limitless applications. Construction. Defense. Transportation. My father prefers luxury goods, but this… this is the ultimate luxury. The fabric of space, tailor-made.”
He said it with the rehearsed passion of a keynote address. Wanda felt a deep, profound disgust. This wasn’t a madman. This was a CEO evaluating a disruptive technology.
“You used her,” Wanda said, the words dropping like stones. “The campaign. The access. Was it a cover? Or just a hobby?”
His brow furrowed momentarily, then cleared. “Ah. Manoban. A charming asset. Vibrant brand alignment.” His head tilted. “Is that the personal stake? How interesting. That was… unstructured data. Not part of the project design.”
Asset. Unstructured data. The terms dehumanized Lisa, boxed her into a spreadsheet. The calm inside Wanda shattered.
The air compressed. A wave of crimson force slammed Arnault into the side of the truck. The data pad clattered to the wet ground. He gasped, clawing at the invisible vise around his chest.
“The project,” Wanda hissed, floating closer, her feet not touching the ground. “The design. Tell me the next phase.”
He choked, a grim smile on his lips. “You think… I’m the architect?” He managed to cough out. “I’m the foreman. The vision… is older. It requires… a specific kind of power to complete.”
His eyes flickered past her, to the weeping tear. “He said you might come. He’s been… cataloguing you.”
A new ice formed in Wanda’s veins. He. Before she could demand more, Arnault’s hand spasmed on a ring he wore. A micro-emitter.
The Cavalium canisters in the truck instantly pressurized. With a sharp crack, they ruptured, not exploding, but vaporizing. A wave of stabilizing force, cold and absolute, erupted outward.
The effect was instantaneous. The screaming tear in reality didn’t heal. It snapped shut with a sound like a universe-ending guillotine.
The recoil was purely metaphysical. It hit Wanda like a psychic backlash, a null-wave that shoved against her chaos magic. She stumbled, her concentration breaking. The hold on Arnault released.
He dropped, gasped, and rolled. A panel on the truck slid open. He scrambled inside. The vehicle’s engines roared, not with combustion, but with a strange, pulsating hum. It shot forward, not along the docks, but directly into a newly manifesting, smaller tear—a precise, engineered exit door.
It vanished. The tear sealed behind it.
Silence, sudden and heavy, fell over the port. The only sounds were the normal rain, the hiss of damaged machinery, and Natasha dropping down beside her, breathing lightly.
“Well,” Natasha said, surveying the stunned or unconscious private army. “That was tidy. For them.”
Wanda stared at the space where the truck had been. The null-wave still echoed in her bones, a feeling of vacuum where her power should be. Cataloguing you.
“He was a messenger,” Wanda said, her voice quiet. “This was all a message. A test run for the technology, and a… a biometric scan. For me.”
She turned her hands over, staring at them. They trembled slightly. Not from fatigue, but from that sudden, chilling nullification. Someone had built a box meant to fit her magic. Someone who used billionaires as foremen.
Natasha placed a hand on her shoulder. The touch was solid, real. “Then we need to find the architect. And we need to do it before he finishes his catalog.”
Wanda nodded. The fuel in her mind was no longer just anger. It was cold, sharp dread. Lisa’s face floated in her memory, smiling, unaware. She was part of the “unstructured data” in a plan vast enough to have a Scarlet Witch-shaped slot waiting.
She looked toward the eastern horizon, where Seoul, and Lisa, lay sleeping. The distance felt infinite, and fraught with a new kind of shadow.