“I formed the thoughts you find, the moods you carry. Your blood whispers my name.”
Relationships: Natasha Romanoff & Wanda Maximoff
Summary: Natasha’s whole life is flipped on its head when she discovers an eerie truth about her wife. No powers AU.
Warnings: 18+, dark themes, mentions of stalking and violence, strong language. (Please let me know if I’m missing anything!)
Author’s Note: here’s chapter two! let me know what you think! now is probably a good time to let you know that I’m writing this in reverse, meaning that the first chapter is the end of the story, and the last chapter is the beginning of the story! dates and times are super important so pay attention! hint: this chapter takes place just hours before the previous chapter :) ALSO this is your reminder that this was not originally a wandanat fanfic! this is my origional novel, I’m just trying to see how people will like it by converting it to a fanfic…. I think I changed all the names but incase I didn’t: Elle=Wanda, Magnolia=Natasha, Tara=Carol, Carter=Bucky. Please let me know what you think, I’m dying for feedback. asks are open if you have any questions! thanks guys! Oh! And incase you missed it, here’s Chapter One:
💬 0 🔁 3 ❤️ 23 · Hindsight 2020 · Chapter One
05 September 2025 6:34pm
“Crawl inside this body - find me where I am most ruined, l
ANYWAY LETS GET TO IT!!! LOVE YA!!!
“And then he turns to me, food still in his mouth, mind you, and says, ‘How much debt do you have?’”
“I’m sorry, what?” Natasha sputters, nearly choking on a sip of water, completely baffled. She curls her fingers around the handle of her water bottle before setting it down and craning her neck to look down at her phone. “I’m looking at the picture of him you sent. Please tell me you told him to get lost.”
Natasha, still slightly damp and flushed from her morning run, occupies her hands tidying the kitchen. She rinses a few dishes before setting them in the dishwasher and starting it. She’s been on the phone with Carol for nearly half an hour, listening to her recount every cringe-worthy and hilarious detail from her recent romantic outings during her vacation abroad. The clock ticks lazily on the wall, but she’s in no rush to be anywhere. The two women don’t find time to chat as often as they should, being what feels like a world apart. She relishes the feeling of catching up with her best friend, wrapping herself around the mental images Carol paints, a mix of glamour and chaos.
“Well, then he hand-rolled me a cigarette, and you know how I am when I’m tipsy,” Carol adds, voice bright and teasing even over the line.
“When in Rome, I guess,” Natasha scoffs, reaching for the spray bottle and washcloth beside the sink, wiping up any residue from her makeshift breakfast; syrup everywhere per usual. She makes a mental note to ask her wife to pick up groceries on her way home from work this evening.
“I’m actually in Verona now, la città dell'amore,” Carol interrupts her train of thought, in a dramatic, yet perfectly elegant Italian accent. Natasha freezes mid-swipe across the counter, letting out an exasperated sigh and a dramatic eyeroll at her best friend’s comment. She then smiles, despite herself, picturing Carol standing there in her element, hair tousled by a Venetian breeze, smirking about how good her Italian is getting. She feels like she can practically hear her best friend’s smug smile.
Natasha and Carol met during their undergrad years as randomly assigned roommates, but to the naked eye, they might as well have been childhood friends. It was an instant connection, and they spent the next four years after that loudly crying at sappy movies, driving aimlessly around the state just to feel something, and laughing like they were kids again. Although the frequency of communication isn’t always ideal, they never lost touch after graduation. But now that Carol is as far away as she is, she can’t get it out of her mind how much she desperately misses her college days, when her best friend could be found only a bedroom away.
“Shut up, I’m pretty much bilingual now!” Carol defends with a giggle, pulling her out of her thoughts. “Anyway, we have another date tomorrow. What about you? How’s the thesis going?”
Natasha sighs again, the kind of expression that comes straight from her chest, one that’s become almost a reflex. She places the washcloth and spray bottle back beside the sink for a moment and rests her elbows on the counter, slumping forward with her head in her hands. In all honesty, it wasn’t going too well. She’s a little over a year into her doctoral program, but she feels like she’s been chipping away at her Lipid Breakdown in Biochemistry thesis for the past decade. Lately, the lab had practically become her second home, and her laptop screen had watched her spin the same couple of paragraphs hundreds upon thousands of times. Despite her wife being the most supportive partner she could imagine and constantly reminding her that she isn’t absolutely moronic, Natasha can’t shake the feeling that she’s the dumbest person alive. And Dr. Bacherman, who is currently awaiting her third section, wouldn’t exactly disagree.
“It’s certainly… going. I’m taking a break from writing today. I feel like I can smell my brain frying.” She says, not exactly feeling the need to pour her heart out about her own failures, especially not after hearing about Carol’s magical vacation across the globe. She picks up the washcloth again and wipes at a particularly stubborn counter stain, a small, domestic mirror of her academic frustration.
“Gross.” Carol jokes. “What are you doing now?”
“Tidying up around the house, making everything look a little more presentable. Today marks six months since the wedding, so I’m gonna surprise Wanda with dinner or something.” Natasha smiles softly, thankful for the change in subject. She picks her head up and wanders across the kitchen, where the stack of mail she brought in after her run sits atop the dining room table.
“Fun! Well, not the cleaning, but the dinner. Tell Wanda I said ‘Hi!’” Carol exclaims, her voice ringing out from across the kitchen where her cellphone sits. “And how is she doing?”
“Will do! I’ll be surprised if she’s not planning something as well. You know how much of a romantic she is,” Natasha says while slicing open an envelope on the counter. “But, she’s been well. Busy at work as usual, but happy and healthy,” She continues flipping through mail, smiling at the thought of her wife. Bills, bills, and more bills, until she comes across a letter addressed to—speak of the devil. She furrows her brow at the sender, however, who appears to be a storage facility that she doesn’t recognize. “Weird,” She murmurs under her breath.
“I like weird. What is it?” Carol asks.
“Nothing, it’s just this letter. Hold on, reading,” she says, tearing it open.
“Hurry, I’m on the edge of my seat.”
During a recent inspection, we identified the presence of black mold in the section of our facility where your storage unit is located (309-1). For your health and safety, and to prevent potential damage to your belongings, we must ask that all items be temporarily evacuated while remediation is completed.
We have attempted to reach you by phone and email regarding this matter. As we have not received confirmation from you, this letter serves as the final notice. Please remove your belongings from your unit no later than September 5, 2025. Our staff will be available on-site to assist and provide protective materials as needed.
We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your prompt attention. If you have any questions, please contact our office at [email protected].
SafeKeep Storage Solutions
“Something about how Wanda needs to evacuate her stuff from a storage unit. I can’t think of anything she would keep in storage,” Natasha says, taking a brief moment to ponder. The location of the facility is halfway across town, and if she remembers correctly, she doesn’t recall their shared account ever getting charged for storage unit occupancy. On top of that, she’s been doing miles of research about enzymes breaking down fungal cell walls. The irony doesn’t escape her: she’s about to deal with a facility full of actual black mold. The universe always seems to bring her back to her damn thesis, huh? She quickly pushes the thought out of her mind and continues her conversation with Carol. “Lord knows we have plenty of room in this house,”
“That’s probably where she hides the bodies,” Carol jokes lightheartedly in a voice that mimics a ghost, even adding a ghoulish, “Ooooo,” sound for effect.
“Oh, please. Disappointingly, I’ve never even seen my wife kill a spider.” Natasha chuckles, walking back across the kitchen to her phone. Her lips curl back into a confused frown, and curl even further when she thinks about breaking the news to Wanda. Her poor wife has a crippling aversion to anything dirty, let alone black mold. “Hold on, C, let me just give Wanda a call and ask her about it. I’ll call you back later, okay?”
“Okie Dokie! Ciao!” Carol shouts back, not missing a beat, before the line goes quiet. Natasha smiles once more, looking at her best friend’s contact photo. She makes a mental note to definitely call her back later on in the day. She swipes her thumb to the left of the screen to her wife’s icon, giving it a gentle tap and putting it on speaker. She sets her phone face up on the counter while the call rings, letter still in her hands. As she expects it to, the call rings out, sending her to voicemail. Wanda usually doesn’t get on her cellphone while she’s at work, especially at this time of the day, so she prepares to send a voicemail.
“Hey, you’ve reached Wanda Maximoff. If you’re my gorgeous wife, hang tight, I’m probably already calling you back. If you’re not her, well… prove you’re worth it. Leave a message after the beep.” Wanda’s recorded voice rings through the phone. Natasha giggles at her voice mail greeting, the one she made during their honeymoon. Back then, Wanda had been absolutely obsessed with the phrase, ‘My wife,” constantly going on and on with, “My wife this,” and “My wife that.” It was perfectly adorable, and the memory never fails to make her grin.
“Hey, sunshine! I know you're probably busy, but when you can, give me a call back. I got this weird letter in the mail, and I wanted to run it by you.” She smiles into the phone. “You know, for the one who works a very serious office job, you might want to look into changing your voicemail greeting, you kooky girl. I love you, bye!” She exclaims with a giggle. She ends the call and sets the letter on the newly polished counter as a reminder to talk about this later.
As the hours tick by throughout the day, Natasha gets increasingly anxious about Wanda’s lack of a call back. She isn’t upset; she knows that Wanda is at work, but when her wife’s lunch break comes and goes without a response, she starts to feel a bit of pressure. The letter mentioned that it was a final notice and that if whatever is in the storage unit isn’t removed before the facility closed today, then it would be dumped off to god knows where. She couldn’t help but picture the potential look of disappointment on Wanda’s face after telling her that not only are her belongings covered in black mold, but that they were also being sold at an auction on the latest episode of Storage Wars.
She checks the time on her phone and sighs. 1pm. She’s already done laundry, swept and mopped every square inch of the house, eaten both breakfast and lunch (and maybe a snack or two), and checked her emails for the day. The only other thing she can think of to do, other than scroll endlessly on social media or get cranking on tweaking her thesis for the millionth hour this week, is to do Wanda the favor of going to get her things from the storage facility. Her wife will still be at the office until 5pm at the absolute earliest, so if she never calls her back, the facility will have already closed before she makes it home. She’s already considered the idea that the letter was spam mail, but figured checking it out might be better safe than sorry.
She picks up her phone again, opens Google, and types SafeKeep Storage Solutions into the search bar. What comes up makes her frown with displeasure and then shiver with revulsion. No wonder this place is being shut down at the hands of black mold; it looks like an absolute dump. The photos on the website are grainy, the paint is peeling off the walls, and the only review is a one-star rating attached to a quote that reads, “The cockroaches in this joint are the size of rats, and the rats the size of chihuahuas.” The padlocks on each unit look rusted to the doors, and the fluorescent light that shines from the ceiling casts the concrete floor in a sticky yellow hue. Their website alone looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2005, flush with outdated links and hollow promises of “Safety Guaranteed!”
“Right,” Natasha mutters under her breath. Why Wanda would choose to keep her stuff here out of all places in the city is absolutely beyond her. This place seriously looks like Wanda would take one step in before getting fearful and asking Natasha to hold her hand down the rest of the hallway.
Nonetheless, she sits up on the couch and walks down the hallway to where her shoes sit by the front door. She makes sure to check her purse for her pepper spray just in case the place exudes the same eeriness portrayed on their joke of a website.
As she walks down the street to her car, she desperately hopes that whatever is in the storage unit will fit in her Volkswagen Jetta and that she won’t have to make more than one trip. She can and she will, but she’d rather not spend more time than she has to rummaging through possibly cockroach-infested—whatever is in there. She imagines it’s probably old college stuff, maybe the overflow that never fit in the moving truck. Since Wanda came all the way from Boston, it makes sense she would have utilized a storage facility to some capacity while studying and working in Baltimore.
It’s also very well possible the unit contains leftover decorations from the wedding, in which case, Natasha doesn’t see much use in keeping them. While she loves her wife and the wedding was the best day of her life, she has to admit that Wanda went just a little overboard with decor.
No matter, she makes the drive through town, listening to a playlist Wanda made for her, titled, ‘Mixtape for My Muse.’ For as long as she’s known her wife, their tastes in music had never lined up, but it always touched her that her wife still curated playlists with her in mind, like she was the center of some private soundtrack. After what happened with Bucky five years ago, she’d convinced herself she was unlovable, broken beyond repair. Then Wanda swept in and proved her wrong, filling her life with a kind of joy that left no room for doubt. Since then, not a day had passed without laughter, without smiling, without feeling chosen.
Being from Baltimore, she's always held a special place in her heart for the city. It’s crooked row houses, the livelihood of the iceskating rink on the harbor, the chaotic mix of grit and charm stitched in its bones, even the smoke coming through the manholes had its charisma to them. No matter how far she’d travelled or how she’d viewed the adjacent beauty of all the wonders she's seen, the skyline of the city always greeted her like an old friend. Now was different, however, as she pulled up to the most unsettling back alley storage facility she’s ever seen. She’s not sure whether to park her car a block away to avoid it getting jacked or to park it as close as possible to make for a swifty escape plan. She eventually decides on the latter to save her the trouble of parallel parking. When she gets out of the car, she speed walks into the building, the bell above the door ringing as she steps in.
“Hi, how are you…” She greets politely as she steps forward to the front desk of the front office. The middle-aged woman glances up from her computer at her for a split second before her gaze returns to the screen, silver hair sticking to the sides of her face. Magnolia’s eyes drift down to the name plate on the desk, “...Ms. Kennedy?”
“Can I help you?” She says in a raspy voice as if she had just gotten done chainsmoking an entire pack of cigarettes minutes before this interaction. Natasha curses herself for thinking it, but she smells as if she had too.
“Yes, I’m actually here to clear out my wife’s storage unit,” she says, warm smile plastered to her face as she tugs an envelope out of her purse. She clears her throat before unfolding and presenting the disinterested woman with the letter. “Um, we received a notification this morning letting us know to clear our stuff out by the end of the day. I’m here to do so.”
“Great, by all means,” the woman says, while lazily gesturing toward the hallway behind her. Natasha shifts uncomfortably as she realizes her mistake.
“Well, you see, I don’t exactly have a key to the unit,” She swallows. “I honestly didn’t even know we were utilizing a storage space until this morning, so…”
“All of our padlocks are combination-based,” The woman says, still not looking up from her computer. “Just punch in some numbers and see if it works.”
Safety guaranteed, my ass, Natasha thinks as she just stares at the woman at the desk. One would think the woman would question whether she was really Wanda’s wife or not, but maybe that’s just wishful thinking. Natasha stays frozen for a minute before just nodding slowly and approaching the hallway. It is, in fact, just like it was in the photos on the website, and part of her wishes she had Wanda’s hand to hold onto at this point. Nevertheless, she persists and makes her way down the hallway, checking the letter in her hands once more for the unit number. 309-1.
When she makes it down the hallway and up the stairs, through this maze of a facility, she stares down at the padlock guarding her wife’s unit. Combination-based, indeed. She decides to give Wanda one last phone call before she quite literally breaks into her personal storage. Unsurprisingly, she’s met with, “Hey, you’ve reached Wanda Maximoff. If you’re my gorgeous wife, hang tight, I’m probably already—” before hanging up.
“Let’s see,” she wonders, shoving her phone back into her purse. She normally has a good idea of what all of Wanda’s regular passwords are, as they're all the same despite Natasha constantly reminding her of password security, but a six-digit is a tough one. She punches in Wanda’s birthday, 05-17-01. Nothing, the lock doesn’t budge. She sighs heavily, but not because the first attempt failed, but more so because she’s worried that Wanda’s poor judgment got the best of her. She tries again, before punching in 12-34-56. Nothing.
“Thank God,” she mutters to herself. She ought to give her silly wife some more credit, she thinks. Finally, as a last-ditch effort, she punches in her own birth date: 05-20-99. The lock clicks open. “Such a romantic,” she murmurs with a grin, pulling the lock out of its socket. She sets the lock on the ground in front of the door, not wanting the orangish rust accumulating around it to rub against her pocket or her purse, before bending down and pulling the latch of the door open.
When the metal door creaks open, it isn't quite what she expects. The motion-sensor lightbulb flickers uncertainly to life, casting jittery shadows along the concrete walls, revealing nothing but a medium-sized cardboard box sitting securely in the center of the room. It isn’t large, and it isn’t intimidating, but there's something certainly off about it. It feels like less of an object and more like a silent observer, the way the flaps hang half open, curling at the edges. It might just be the eeriness of the facility as a whole, but it feels like the box is glaring at her when she steps in.
Despite the oddity of the singular box resting heavily in a 10ft by 10ft room, and the tiny prickle of unease crawling up her spine, she walks fully in, picking it up by the corners of its base. It isn’t heavy, it isn’t moldy; it’s almost too perfectly ordinary, and she lets herself grin, imagining the look on Wanda’s face when she brings it home. “And the Best Wife Ever Award goes too…” she thinks, patting it like a prize.
She doesn’t bother shutting the door behind her, confident that clearing the unit is the task at hand, and turns to descend the yellow cast concrete stairs. The hallway stretches ahead, peeling paint and a suspiciously sticky floor catching the flickering fluorescent light. The air smells faintly of mildew, and the low scuttle of something small and quick echoes somewhere in the distance. Natasha tucks the box under her arm, unaware of the subtle, almost imperceptible shift in the air around it, as if the thing she’s carrying is watching her in return.
“Thank you for choosing SafeKeep Storage, have a securely spectacular day.” The woman at the front desk scratchily calls behind her as she walks down through the visitor area, box in both hands, in a tone that can only really be described as insipid. Natasha lets out a quick, “Uh, thanks,” before leaving, the bell on the door ringing after her as she steps outside to the parking lot.
She speedwalks to the lot, yet again, making it to her car and immediately checking the time. 2:30pm, perfect. She fires off a text to her wife, letting her know to disregard the last voicemail and asking her to pick up a list of groceries. What better than a surprise dinner date than to surprise her with her non-moldy box from the storage unit, she thinks to herself as she carefully pulls out of the lot, back into the city that owns her heart.
When Natasha arrives back at the townhouse, she carries that box in with ease, setting it softly down onto the living room coffee table, still riding the high of being the best wife ever. She flops down onto the couch beside it before checking her phone for the time. Her wife will arrive home within two hours, giving her just enough time to give Tara a call back, to tell her all about her journey through the scariest part of Baltimore City. She dials her number. One ring, two rings, straight to voicemail.
“Damn,” she groans, propping her legs up on the coffee table beside the box. The gnawing thought in her brain screams at her to go grab her laptop and look at her thesis, but the curiosity in her nervous system persists. She swings her legs back down to the floor and sits upright, grabbing hold of the box. What’s her’s is mine, right? She opens the flaps of the box with both hands and peers inside. At first glance, it’s a bunch of junk. A couple of beat-up journals, CDs, photos, and a fistful of receipts yellowed with age.
However, the longer she stares, the less random it seems. She pushed passed everything, heading straight for the journals: five of them, neatly stacked. The covers are labeled by year, but when she opened one of the journals stacked neatly on top, labeled 2025, it wasn’t Wanda’s precise, looping handwriting. It was strained, scribbled, shaky writing that she didn’t recognize. The first page is horrifying on its own, but they bear themselves to Natasha’s eyes, begging to be read.
You don’t belong with us anymore. I’ve kept you long enough, touched you too many times. She’s here now, and that should be enough. Best to let all these pieces of you sleep where she’ll never look. Out of sight, out of reach, out of time. If I leave you here, maybe you’ll finally stop whispering.
More entries, the same cadence, obsessive and wandering, splayed across each page. Each one scribbled in a rush. They’re scrawled with dates, names, times. Her name, circled, underlined, repeating like an obsession. ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’ scribbled manically. Receipts from coffee shops she used to haunt as an undergrad in Baltimore City. Movie stubs from films she knows she saw alone. Sticky notes were attached to momentos: hair ties, notecards from a study group she’d been in, ornaments straight off her family’s Christmas tree. A postcard from January 2nd, 2022, scrawled in that same frenzied handwriting.
‘Wanda, right?’ That’s all it took. The way my name slid off her lips, so soft, careless, like it meant nothing. But it meant everything. I’d been waiting for her to see me, to pull me out of the corner I’d been watching from. That first taste of her voice wrapped around my name… I knew I’d never let it go. I’d follow it anywhere. I’d rot in the dark if it meant I could keep that sound pressed against my skull forever.
Natasha’s fingers tremble as she digs deeper. A stack of photographs slides loose. There are shots of her walking across campus during her undergrad years, sitting at a bus stop, jogging through the local reservoir. None are posed. None are taken with her consent. In some, her face is half-turned, blurry, like she’s caught mid-laugh or mid-blink. In others, the camera is too close, as though the photographer was right behind her. Photos of her and Tara. Photos of her and Bucky. Bucky proposing, Bucky laughing on a park bench beside her, Bucky in his own apartment, lounging lazily. Marked by the year 2021, a note reads:
Bucky. The name alone makes me want to spit. He’s nothing but a filler, a cardboard cutout pretending to be a man. He touches her like she’s ordinary, like she’s not spun from gold and fire. Worthless. Doesn’t deserve to breathe her air. Every second she wastes on him is a second stolen from us. He’s in the way of everything. Of destiny. Of the future already written. But paper burns easily, and so do people.
Her breath catches in her throat. The box smells faintly of cigarette smoke, of mildew, of years pressed flat. Beneath the photos is something worse: a spiral-bound notebook with her initials scratched into the cover like it has been clawed in. She flips it open to reveal page after page of surveillance notes. Dates, times, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019. Where she was. Who she was with. What she was wearing. Tiny details no one should remember, but someone had catalogued, obsessively, religiously. The first page of the last journal makes her stomach flip and churn with thick, wild acid: A printed-out social media screenshot, depicting her at what looks to be twenty-one years old, taken on a family vacation in 2019 in an ordinary bookstore in Boston.
I saw her. God, she’s perfect. Like the air cracked open just to spit her out in front of me. My bones are buzzing. I couldn’t look away even if someone put a gun to my head. I wanted to grab her wrist, say her name (do you have one? Do you belong to me already?). She laughed at a book, and I swear my heart split open. I’ll see her again. I have to. She doesn’t know it yet, but we’re inevitable.
Not just the photos and the journals, but keys too. Dorm keys, house keys, a cellphone taped over and marked, ‘Ours.’ There were clothes; Natasha’s from years ago, clothes she thought she lost forever. Dirty napkins with lipstick stains, press on fingernails from her party-girl days, Bucky's engagement ring, a driver's licence with the face of her wife under a different name—
Natasha closes the box forcefully and pushes it as far away as she can get it, realizing she hadn’t done so much as taken a breath in minutes. Who the fuck was Lillith Sloan?
Her pulse hammers in her ears, loud enough to drown out everything else. For a fleeting second, she wishes she could go back to the first time Wanda said I love you, when everything still sounded like a promise instead of a lie.
The name echoes in her head; Lillith Sloan, Lillith Sloan, Lillith—
