Chapter Nineteen

Wanda

The man in the nightmares visited her every night, no matter how many drugs the men in lab coats would give her, and no matter how many times the min in lab coats would pulse electricity through her brain. And the nightmares always started the same way. She would be running, though she wasn't sure where she was running from and where she was running to. But she was never fast enough to get away. The man would always find her, and then she would wake up.

Her days had been the same since she came to the place. She would be woken up, given enough food so that she wouldn't die, and be so drugged she didn't know where she was, or even who she was. Until she was reminded. Her father had betrayed her, though that didn't surprise her. She'd heard Marya and Django speak of the man, and none of what they had to say had been positive. But her brother…

She had never wanted to murder someone so much in her entire life.

She frowned when a man in a wheelchair came into the room. She never had visitors. There was only one explanation to the occurrence, and that was that she'd finally lost her mind for good. He'd introduced himself as Charles Xavier, and that was when she had lost it.

Everything she'd learned about Charles Xavier had come from Magneto, and none of it has been positive. He wanted mutant and human equality, which she knew first-hand would never happen. Marya couldn't handle her mutant powers, and she'd been the one to raise Wanda, and had been, at least before the incident, one of the most open-minded people the girl had ever known. If she couldn't handle the powers, Wanda doubted anyone else could.

And that had been confirmed when the men in the lab coats made damn sure her hands were bound at all times, so she couldn't cause an incident. So she wouldn't come close to murdering someone like she had with her brother.

Oh no. Wanda would never come close to murdering someone again. The next time she saw Pietro, she would make damn sure he didn't get back up.

Still, the men in those awful white lab coats had insisted she speak with Xavier, or rather sit there while he probed her mind. On more than one occasion she'd managed to get her hands free long enough to cause some serious damage to the room. And on more than one occasion that had landed her locked in a six by six padded room with no light. By that time she was convinced the asylum existed to make mental patients even more mental.

Naturally, when she went to sleep that night, the man visited her again. Only this time, it was different. They were in a black space, one with nothing in it, other than themselves. "What do you want from me?" Wanda had asked in a timid voice. She had never been brave enough to speak to the man before.

"Control," he had answered. And Wanda, just wanting him to leave her alone, had conceded to give him that.

If someone were to ask Wanda where she was, she would not say she was in a mental hospital. No, Wanda was much more inclined to give a truthful answer to that. She was in hell.