I've pretty much always liked MCU Wanda, but recently I came across one too many Tony-defense posts on Tumblr that involved semi-incidental Wanda-bashing, and I guess that tipped me over into fiercely protective Wanda Maximoff Defense Squad membership. This fic is pretty much those feelings turned into some headcanons...and then I ended up sticking in a few other headcanons to reestablish the Maximoffs' Jewish and Romani heritage without getting into confusing comics stuff or ignoring the cross in Wanda's room, because erasure is gross and also the way Marvel's been dealing with HYDRA in comics lately is super gross and I'm mad about it.

It's been a long time since Wanda's really thought of a place as home. The apartment she and Pietro shared with their parents was home, and after that nothing was, nothing except Pietro himself. Now—she's not sure anywhere can be, without him, but she thinks maybe the Avengers could be, and the room she picked in their facility. If she tried. If she wanted to.

The problem is, she's not sure she does. Or at least that's how she thinks about it, every time a thought bubbles up about what she could do to make the room hers, make it the peaceful little sanctuary she hasn't allowed herself to want in more than a decade. It's easier to think she doesn't want that after all, or doesn't want it here, than to deliberately confront the more likely idea, which is that she doesn't deserve it in the first place.

It's been two weeks since the battle in Novi Grad, and the question will have to be faced eventually. Lately, she's caught herself thinking more often that she might hang a ribbon board above her bed for photos, or ask Tony about repainting the walls, or start looking for artwork of some kind—or, just as dangerously, new things she might try in training, and even how she might use her abilities on a real Avengers mission. And it's getting harder to stop thinking any of those things, or keep pretending she doesn't know she wants them.

It's been getting harder to sleep, too, even though she uses the room for almost nothing else. She doesn't really want to face the idea that she's going to need to deal with…all of this…soon, and make some decisions one way or the other. She has to, and she can't do it.

Which is why Natasha finds her out in one of the common rooms a few hours later, well after sunset, curled up in a chair by the window. She's trying hard enough to think about nothing at all that she only vaguely notices someone else entering the room.

"Nice view?" Natasha asks from a few paces away—in Sokovian, with no accent at all, which startles Wanda for a second before she realizes she really shouldn't be surprised.

Wanda blinks at her, then at the window. It's dark enough by now that there's no view to speak of, and it occurs to her to wonder when, exactly, that happened. The half-full mug of tea in her hands is completely cold, and her legs are stiff from sitting so long in one position. She forces a laugh. "Sorry, I was just…"

"Hey, I'm not judging," Natasha says. "Mind if I join you?"

Wanda feels herself come alert, and she carefully sets the mug down on the windowsill. It's a casual question, asked in a perfectly casual tone of voice, but with a spy, that doesn't necessarily mean much. "It's…not much of a view," she says.

"It's always good to take time to decompress," Natasha says easily, taking a seat in the nearest chair with one leg curled up under her. "Although if there's something on your mind, talking to someone else can help."

Not casual at all, then. "Do I seem like I have something on my mind?"

Natasha shrugs. "You've seemed a little distracted lately, yeah. Nobody's blaming you," she adds, apparently seeing something in Wanda's expression. "You've been through a lot. It can take a little while to find your footing, especially in a new place with new people."

"It's not that," Wanda says. "Well—it is, but it's…not just that."

Natasha waits, and when Wanda doesn't elaborate, she prompts gently, "Clint mentioned you might be feeling guilty."

"Because I am guilty," Wanda says. It's an unexpected relief to say it out loud.

Natasha tilts her head, expression one of neutral interest. "Making Ultron was kind of a team effort, the way I understand it."

"But I started it. Stark had the idea in the first place because of me."

"Tony was already experimenting with artificial intelligence," Natasha says, but her tone is still neutral; not arguing, just stating facts. "Knowing him, Ultron might've happened anyway."

Wanda shakes her head. "That doesn't matter, though, does it? This was how it happened. I did this. I—" She's silent for a long moment, struggling for words.

"For you, this all started a long time ago with Tony and his weapons, didn't it?"

"For more than half my life," Wanda says quietly, "I have had nightmares because of him. So when I saw him standing there in Strucker's base, I thought: well then. I will give him a nightmare. And then—that wasn't enough. I thought—I wanted to destroy him so much I stopped thinking about anything else. I hurt people. Not just all of you, not just helping create Ultron and carrying out his plans, but…I sent the Hulk into Johannesburg, and I thought you were all evil and I was doing the right thing trying to destroy you, but—" She swallows, hard, feeling like she might choke on shame and grief, but now that she's started, the words won't stop. "People died because I did that. I looked it up after I got here. Not many, but—people died, more people were hurt, there was so much destruction, and I didn't…I didn't even realize. I didn't think. I was so blinded by my stupid, pointless need for revenge, or something, that I caused the same nightmares for children in that city as the ones Stark's missile gave me. I became exactly what I hated. And I couldn't see it." She's not actually crying, somehow; she thinks it might be easier if she were.

"You did help stop Ultron," Natasha says.

Wanda snorts. "When it was almost too late. When I realized he wanted to destroy everything. But sending the Hulk on a rampage through a city of innocent people—that didn't stop me. And somehow you all still think I deserve to be here."

"I don't know how much deserving has to do with it," Natasha says, her tone measured. "Some of us haven't always been heroes either. But the skills we used for the wrong reasons and the wrong causes in the past are the same ones that let us help people today."

Wanda stares down at her hands, eyes prickling. "How do you do it?" she bursts out. As soon as she's said it, she hates herself a little bit for asking, a little bit more for the plaintive note she can hear in her own voice, but at the same time she can't not ask. "How do you—live with yourself, and keep going, and help people when you've done terrible things?"

Natasha is silent for a moment, and Wanda digs her fingernails into her palm, wanting very much to kick herself. She isn't judging, especially since she's talking about herself more than about Natasha, but she has to wonder if she could have picked a worse way to word the question if she'd tried. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't—"

"No, it's a fair question," Natasha says, "just one without an easy answer." She smiles, very faintly. "And you don't have to feel guilty about asking. It's not exactly a secret that I spent a long time fighting for the wrong people, and everyone here knows at least a little about some of the things I did."

"I am sorry, though," Wanda says. "I mean, especially for…" She makes a little twisting gesture near her head, because there isn't really a good way to say violating the privacy of your mind, unearthing old traumas, and forcing you to relive your worst memories.

Natasha, to her immense credit, doesn't so much as twitch at the reminder. "I appreciate it, although it does change things a little that I was an enemy combatant at the time."

"Yes," Wanda makes herself say. "But the people in Johannesburg…were not."

Natasha nods, and that's almost a relief too, that she isn't arguing the point. "Neither were a lot of the people I hurt and killed. The things we've done—they don't go away. But I think you know that now."

Wanda nods miserably. It's more or less what she expected.

Natasha sighs. "It's easy to fall into a lot of different traps. Like thinking you can balance the scales somehow if you save enough people, or if you punish yourself enough, or put your own life on the line when you don't need to. But it doesn't actually work that way. So—you do what you can. You…remember. You carry that weight, let it drive you without letting it overwhelm you." She glances at Wanda with one of those tiny, crooked smiles. "Some days are harder than others. But I'm afraid there's no secret that makes it easier."

"I know," Wanda says. "I suppose I was hoping to hear one anyway, but…it shouldn't be easy, should it? To know what you're capable of doing."

"And you can't un-know it. It's better, if you don't try. Accept that you have to live with it, and then choose to use your strengths differently." She pauses. "And since you're probably not going to ask, living with your own losses? It's pretty similar, in a lot of ways. There's no shortcut, no secret. Some days are harder than others. It doesn't…go away. But you learn how to keep going, how to make it mean something. How to deal with the fact that people used you and turned you into a weapon."

Wanda stiffens. "I volunteered. We both did."

"Sure, at least at first." Natasha's gaze is shrewd. "You thought you had nothing to lose, and by the time you learned otherwise, it was too late. Does that sound about right?"

She remembers the night the first test subject died—a kid younger than her, barely eighteen, screaming as the power in that scepter tore him apart—and then the next, less than a day later. Remembers the frantic, whispered conversations with Pietro, finally convincing him that the danger wasn't worth it, because she might be willing to do many things to save Sokovia and destroy the Avengers, but losing her brother wasn't one of them. Remembers trying to leave, only once, before Strucker caught them and made sure they knew better than to try again, and the fresh horror of realizing—

"We didn't know," Wanda says. It sounds like an excuse, but she has to say it (maybe, at some point, she'll stop feeling like she has to say it). "That they were HYDRA. That they were…Nazis. We should've—looked harder, maybe, it was obvious once we knew, but when we volunteered—we never would've agreed to work with them if we'd known."

"You were young, angry, and desperate," Natasha says, and Wanda flushes, even though there's no judgment in the other woman's tone. "Extremist organizations tend to prey on exactly that kind of person for recruitment. It's not like HYDRA's been advertising itself anywhere, either, but even in the US, nobody knew. I was working for them—everyone in SHIELD was, for decades—and I had no idea. And memories in your part of the world are probably a lot longer." She studies Wanda for a moment, and Wanda lifts her chin, not looking away even though she wants to. "They would've been careful. If you didn't know until it was too late, that was by design. But even if you could have known for some reason, it doesn't accomplish anything to beat yourself up for it now."

Wanda swallows, finally dropping her gaze. She still doesn't want to imagine what her grandfather would think, if he knew. He'd never talked about the camps much, or the great-uncle she never met who died there, but she remembers the first time she saw the tattoo on his arm.

"Listen," Natasha says. "I won't say you did nothing wrong. But you know it was wrong, now. Hating yourself for it doesn't help anyone. And your situation is…a little unusual."

"Most people's mistakes don't help Nazis or destroy cities," Wanda says sharply.

"Sure, but I mean you specifically. I doubt I can imagine what it's like to get psychic powers, but I'm guessing it would mess with your head under the best of circumstances. And considering HYDRA had you, and how they tend to treat people—it doesn't surprise me much if you weren't thinking straight for a while."

Well, yes, that's one way to put it. "Strucker thought it was funny," she says. "I don't know if he thought there might be something different about Pietro and me that would let us survive his experiments, or if we were just lucky, but he had files on all of us. He knew—our dad was Jewish, you see. Secular. And our mom was Romani, raised Catholic. And Strucker thought it was funny, that he tricked us into working for HYDRA. That…people like us were helping them. He made us believe he controlled us, that our powers would tear us apart without him and his drugs. I should've known better."

"Maybe," Natasha says, and Wanda blinks at her, almost hurt. "I should've known better earlier than I did too, maybe. But I didn't, and you didn't, and neither of us can change that. What we do now—that's what matters."

Wanda exhales. "Yes. You're right. I think maybe I knew that too, but I needed to hear someone else say it."

"Clint did as much for me," Natasha says, her lips twitching in another little half-smile. "The least I can do is pay it forward."

"Thank you," Wanda says. "I'll…try to remember."

"And I'll remind you as often as you need—that, and anything else. I can't promise I can always give you good advice, but I can always listen." Natasha gets up and stretches. "Right now, though, I think it's time for bed. There's an art sale tomorrow morning in town that I've been meaning to check out, if you feel like joining me."

Wanda nods slowly. She's not sure that she feels better, exactly, for having talked about all of this, but…something inside her feels more settled than it did before. If being an Avenger isn't about deserving, if it's just about trying her best to do the right thing, then…

"Maybe I will," she says.

The bits about Wanda's room are mostly drawn from a cool article about Civil War's set design that I can't link here, but there's a link in the AO3 version of this fic. Fic title is from "No Way Down" by The Shins; the actual subject of the lyrics has nothing to do with this fic, but I liked the line and thought that specific bit worked here.