Take Her Heart
wandanat x fem!reader
Summary: A Queen who thinks she has to get her stepdaughter's heart to save her own magic. A Huntsman sent to bring her back who falls first. A Princess who was never running from anyone, she just wanted to see the forest. What can go wrong? Apparently, everything.
Tags: Queen Wanda being emo, Huntsman Nat being a simp, one judgmental rabbit, Gerald the emotional-support stick, always ambigous Mirror, friends to lovers? protective wanda, protective nat, jealousy, minimal angst, comfort, happy ending
A/N: I had fun with this one-shot, i am a wandanat whore first so this is a nice break from my main series, City of Angels. Hope you guys like it. English isn't my first language, so sorry for any mistakes. I was supposed to post this tomorrow but the internet is shitty so posting it now before it cuts. 💋
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The Mirror had never once lied to Wanda Maximoff.
That was precisely the trouble with it.
It told the truth the way a knife told the truth. Cleanly, and without the faintest concern for what the wound would do to the person left holding it. Never plainly. Never kindly. Never with any regard for how a grieving witch, crowned too young and loved too little, might twist a prophecy into the shape of her own worst fear.
But on the night everything began, Wanda did not know that yet.
She knew only that her magic was failing, thread by thread, like a tapestry someone was patiently unpicking in the dark. And that the Mirror, when she finally demanded an answer, had spoken your name.
The throne room was silent at midnight, moonlight spilling in long silver panels across floors of black marble, catching on the crown where it sat abandoned beside the throne. Wanda rarely wore it when no one was watching. Some nights she barely wore it when they were.
The kingdom called her many things. The Scarlet Queen. The Witch Queen. The Scarlet Witch.
The foreign conqueror who had helped your father before he became mad, upturn a rotten dynasty to its roots and rebuilt something stranger and stronger in its place. The destroyer of kings, the savior of the kingdom, the woman men still lowered their voices to discuss even twelve years after the war had ended.
You had only ever called her Wanda, and when you were young, stepmother.
You always had. Long before the crown. Long before the kingdom that had once been your father’s became entirely hers.
Wanda stood before the golden Mirror now with one hand pressed flat to its cold frame, as though she might steady herself against it.
“Why is my magic weakening?”
The liquid surface shivered. Gold spilled upward out of the glass and gathered itself, slowly, into the shape of a faceless man.
“Because another has come into her power.”
Wanda’s brow furrowed. “Who?”
“The daughter of the fallen king.”
Something in her chest went very still. “No.”
“The Princess.”
“Y/N,” she said, and her own voice sounded strange to her, thinned by something she refused to name.
The Mirror inclined its head, and for one unguarded moment Wanda could see you as you had been years ago — barefoot in the palace gardens, hair loose and wild down your back, laughing as you stole apples directly from the orchard trees despite having an entire kitchen at your command. You had always been impossible. Even as a child. Especially as a child. And you had always, without a flicker of hesitation, adored her.
It had been obvious to the entire court. Obvious to the servants. Obvious, apparently, to everyone except Wanda herself.
You had trailed her through unfamiliar corridors the very first week she arrived, asking endless questions about Sokovia. Its rivers, its winters, the shape of the mountains she never spoke of unless you asked. You had learned enough of the language to greet her properly before breakfast, stammering over the consonants until you got them right, simply because you thought it might make her smile.
Once, when Wanda had been carried back from an ambush half-conscious and bleeding, you had planted yourself at her bedside for two days and threatened every healer in the castle who dared suggest you leave.
When Wanda finally took the throne in her own right, eight years after first becoming Queen at your father's side, she had braced herself for your hatred. She had rehearsed, quietly, the different shapes it might take, screaming, weeping, a door slammed and never opened again.
It never came.
You had been frightened, yes. Grieving, certainly, in the private, complicated way one grieves a parent who was also a tyrant. But never once had that fear or grief been aimed at her.
The morning after her coronation, while half the court held its breath waiting to see what the new Queen would do with a dead king’s daughter, you had walked directly into the throne room in a white nightgown, your hair unbrushed, and climbed the dais steps as though you owned them.
Wanda remembered every second of it.
You had looked at the crown on her head. Then at her. And said, with the devastating honesty only an innocent girl who had never learned to fear consequences could manage, “It doesn’t suit you.”
The entire court had very nearly died where they stood.
“What?” Wanda had said.
“The crown.” You gestured at it, unimpressed. “Too severe. It makes you look like you’re being punished for something.”
“I am the Queen.”
“I know that.”
“Have you lost your mind?”
“No,” you’d said, already reaching for it before anyone could stop you, sliding it from her head with a familiarity that should have been treasonous and instead simply left Wanda too stunned to move.
You’d turned it over once in your hands, examining it with the withering scrutiny of a woman appraising bad jewelry. “Ugly,” you’d pronounced, and set it down beside the throne, and smiled up at her as though you had just done her an enormous favor.
“There. Much better.”
And Wanda Maximoff, the terrifying Scarlet Queen who had burned a dynasty to ash and salt, had laughed. Genuinely, helplessly laughed, for the first time since she had taken the palace.
Nobody had dared call you a prisoner after that. You weren’t. Wanda would never have allowed it, whatever the whispers said. She gave you the northern wing because it overlooked the gardens you loved, your own household, your own servants, your own library stacked to the rafters, your own horses in the royal stables. You dined at her table. You wandered the palace freely. You sat beside her through council meetings whenever you were sufficiently bored to wander in and prop your chin on your hand and make faces at the more long-winded ministers until Wanda had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep a straight face.
The only thing Wanda had ever insisted upon, without exception, was your protection.
Constant. Obnoxious. Protection so relentless you had spent years complaining about it. Which was, naturally, precisely why you had also spent years escaping it. Not the castle. Never the castle. Only the guards, who hovered at your shoulder like anxious geese and reported your every sneeze back to the Queen as though it were a matter of state.
There was a difference, you always insisted, between running away and simply wanting one hour, one single hour, that belonged to no one but yourself.
Wanda had never agreed. Wanda had never once, in all these years, managed to win that particular argument.
The Mirror’s voice drew her back into the present, cool and inexorable as a blade sliding free of its sheath.
“Her innocence and her purity are all that can destroy you.”
Scarlet light flickered involuntarily over Wanda’s fingers. She forced her hand still.
“But she is also your salvation, Queen.”
Wanda looked up sharply. “How?”
“You must have her heart.”
The silence that followed felt enormous.
“Her heart,” Wanda repeated slowly, as though testing the shape of the words in her mouth for a trap.
“Yes.”
“In my hand?”
“If you are fortunate.”
The color drained from Wanda’s face. “And if I take it?”
“You shall never again fear your power abandoning you.”
Her voice, when it came, barely rose above a whisper. “Her death restores me.”
The Mirror said nothing at all, and Wanda, proud, frightened, and utterly unpracticed at hoping for anything gentle from an oracle that had never once offered her gentleness, took that silence for confirmation.
“No.” The word left her like a plea rather than a decree, which frightened her almost as much as the prophecy itself. “Not her. Anyone. Anyone else in this kingdom, but not her.”
Nothing answered.
“There must be another way,” she said, and her voice cracked audibly on another, scarlet magic trembling so violently around her hands that the nearest candle guttered and died.
She turned from the Mirror. Stopped. Straightened her spine the way she had taught herself to do a hundred times before, until the tremor in her shoulders was no longer visible to anyone who did not already know to look for it.
“Bring me Natasha Romanoff.”
****
Natasha Romanoff had been called a great many things over the years. Assassin. Widow. Traitor. Hero, occasionally, by people who clearly hadn’t done their research. In the northern kingdoms, where she had spent the better part of a decade making a very lucrative and very reluctant name for herself, they called her the Huntsman.
Natasha hated the title with a passion she reserved for very few things in this world. Mostly because Clint had heard it exactly once, years ago, and had never once let her forget it since.
The throne room doors opened, and she walked through them in battered leather armor with twin blades crossed at her back and no fewer than four knives she was technically not permitted to carry inside the palace, all of which the guards at the door had, as usual, chosen not to mention.
Wanda sat upon the throne, watching her approach with an expression carefully arranged into something regal and unreadable.
“You summoned me.”
“I did.”
“Should I be flattered, or should I start counting exits?”
“That depends entirely on how attached you’ve grown to that horse.”
Something flickered, almost fondly, across Natasha’s mouth. “I believe the word you’re looking for is borrowed.”
“For six months.”
“She was restless. I merely obliged her.”
“She was a royal mare, Natasha, not a wayward cousin in need of adventure.”
“With respect, Your Majesty, I’ve met your royal mare. She wanted the adventure considerably more than I did.”
For a moment, just a moment, it almost felt like old times, before the crown, before the war and the marriage, had carved a distance between them that neither of them had ever quite found the nerve to name. Then Wanda’s expression shifted, and Natasha, who noticed everything, noticed that immediately.
“What happened?”
“Y/N is gone.”
“Gone.” Natasha’s brows rose. “Gone how? Gone as in she’s hiding in the orchard again and refusing to come down from a tree, or gone as in...”
“She left the palace grounds entirely at an unknown hour. Her guards believed she was asleep in her chambers. She had arranged pillows beneath the blankets to resemble a sleeping woman and climbed out through the window while they stood directly outside her door congratulating themselves on a quiet evening.”
Natasha stared at her for a long moment, then failed, quite spectacularly, to keep a straight face. “That is genuinely impressive.”
“It is not impressive, it is—” Wanda caught herself, pressed two fingers briefly to her temple as though warding off a headache that had been building ever since she talked to the Mirror. “She has grown increasingly inventive.”
“How old is she now?”
“That is not relevant.”
“It’s somewhat relevant to whether I should be treating this as a rescue or an inconvenience.”
“She went into the Black Forest.”
That erased whatever amusement had been building on Natasha’s face in an instant. “Ah.”
“Precisely.”
“How long has she been in there?”
“Since yesterday, as far as anyone can determine.”
Natasha exhaled slowly through her nose. “She’s never gone that far before.”
That much was true, and they both knew it. You had a long and well-documented history of slipping into nearby villages in cloaks you were somehow convinced made you unrecognizable, of exploring half-collapsed ruins two valleys over, of vanishing for six hours once because you had discovered a waterfall and simply lost track of the time watching it.
Wanda had very nearly mobilized half the royal guard that day before you strolled back through the gates carrying an armful of wildflowers and no apparent understanding of the panic you had caused. She hadn’t spoken to you for two full days afterward.
Mostly, if she was honest with herself, because every time she looked at you she had wanted, in equal and violent measure, to fold you into her arms and to shake you until your teeth rattled.
But the Black Forest was not a waterfall. The Black Forest was not a village two valleys over. Every soul in the kingdom knew what lived in the dark beneath those trees, and every soul in the kingdom, wisely, stayed well clear of it.
Natasha studied Wanda’s face carefully. “Why the Black Forest, of all places?”
“I don’t know.”
“And why does that terrify you more than it should?”
Wanda went very still.
“Wanda.”
The Queen looked away, toward the tall windows and the dark beyond them. “The Mirror spoke of her.”
Everything in Natasha’s posture sharpened. “What did it say?”
A long pause. “That she can destroy me.”
Natasha said nothing, waiting.
“And that she is also my salvation.”
“That’s contradictory, even for a talking mirror.”
“It usually is.”
“Is there more?”
Wanda’s jaw tightened until a muscle jumped along it. “It says I must have her heart.”
Natasha went very quiet for a moment, turning that phrase over slowly, the way she turned over every piece of information she was ever given, searching for the second meaning hidden beneath the first. Then, carefully — because with Wanda one always had to be careful — she asked, “Romantically, I assume?”
Wanda stared at her as though she had grown a second head.
“It’s not an unreasonable interpretation,” Natasha said, shrugging, unbothered.
“No.”
“Did the Mirror specify otherwise?”
“It meant it literally.”
“Did it use the word literally?”
“Natasha.”
“I’m simply asking a clarifying question.”
“It told me I must have her heart in my hand.”
“People say that about romance all the time. It’s practically a figure of speech.”
“I am a witch who deals daily in literal hearts, Natasha, and it did not sound as though it were being poetic.”
Natasha exhaled and looked away, toward the dark windows, giving Wanda a moment she clearly needed and would never have asked for outright. “You don’t want to hurt her.”
“No.” The answer came immediately, too immediately, too raw, and Wanda seemed almost startled by the force of her own denial.
Something in Natasha’s expression softened, just slightly, just enough. “Then don’t.”
“If the prophecy is true—”
“Talking mirrors are annoyingly fond of riddles they never bother explaining. That doesn’t make every reading of one correct, least of all the darkest one available.”
“It does not lie.”
“I never said it lied. I said you could still misunderstand it. Those are not the same accusation.”
Wanda turned to face her fully. “Are you going to help me find her, or are you going to stand there dismantling my grief with logic?”
Natasha sighed, long and put-upon, though something in her had already decided the moment Wanda said Y/N is gone. “Why me?”
“Because you are the only person in this kingdom who has entered that forest and returned to tell of it.”
“Which is precisely the argument for why I should never be foolish enough to do it twice.”
“Natasha.”
“No.”
“Please.”
Natasha went very still.
Wanda rarely said please. Wanda, in all the years Natasha had known her, had almost never said please to her. That alone was answer enough to every question Natasha had been too proud to ask lately about where she stood in this Queen’s life.
She rubbed a hand across her face. “Fine.”
Wanda’s shoulders dropped half an inch, the only outward sign of the breath she’d been holding.
“But I bring her home alive,” Natasha said. “That is not negotiable.”
“Of course.”
“And when we find her, no one is cutting anything out of anyone until we understand precisely what that Mirror actually meant. I don’t care what it told you. I’ve watched you misread far simpler texts than prophecy, Wanda.”
Wanda’s expression hardened with the beginnings of an argument. “I would never—”
Natasha gave her one long, level look, and Wanda’s protest died unspoken in her throat.
“Fine,” the Queen said instead, quietly.
Natasha turned toward the doors.
“Romanoff.”
She glanced back. Wanda’s voice, when it came again, had lost its edge entirely.
“She doesn’t know. About the prophecy. About any of it.”
“Good,” Natasha said. “Keep it that way as long as you can.”
“Bring her home.”
Natasha allowed herself, just for a moment, the ghost of a smile. “I’ll bring your princess back to you, Your Majesty.”
“She is not my—” Wanda started, but Natasha was already gone, and the doors had already swung shut behind her, and the protest hung unfinished and entirely unconvincing in the empty throne room.
****
You were, for the record, having an excellent day.
This detail would become important later, when everyone insisted on describing what you’d done as running away, because you had not been running away from anyone. You had been exploring. There was a considerable difference, and you intended to make that difference known to absolutely everyone who tried to suggest otherwise.
You had wanted to see the Black Forest since you were sixteen years old. Wanda had forbidden it, in the particular flat, immovable tone she reserved for exactly three subjects, since you were sixteen years old. Naturally, this had only made it more interesting for approximately the last couple of years.
You knew, by now, precisely which guards dozed during the afternoon watch, which kitchen door never quite latched, and which stretch of the western wall could be scaled if one resolutely ignored the very real possibility of breaking one’s neck in the attempt. You had assumed the Black Forest would prove to be much like every other forbidden place Wanda had ever dramatically warned you away from — mysterious, faintly unsettling, probably beautiful, and almost certainly survivable by a woman with reasonable good sense and sturdy boots.
You had not accounted for the wolves.
Or the trees that seemed, on occasion, to have relocated themselves entirely while you weren’t looking.
Or the fact that you were now, by any honest accounting, thoroughly and inconveniently lost.
You stood in a small clearing holding a stout branch you had claimed as a weapon some hours earlier, glaring down a rabbit that had been watching you with an expression you found deeply suspicious.
“You,” you said, “have been following me.”
The rabbit continued chewing its grass with maddening indifference.
“I know you have. I’ve counted. This is the fourth time you’ve appeared.”
Nothing.
“Do you know where the road is?”
Still nothing, though the rabbit’s ears twitched, which you chose to interpret as evasion.
“I am, technically, still a princess of this kingdom,” you informed it, with as much dignity as a woman covered in mud and forest debris could summon. “I could have you arrested.”
Behind you, someone made a sound suspiciously like a stifled laugh.
You spun, brandishing your branch with far more confidence than the branch itself deserved. “Who’s there?”
A figure stepped out from behind a wide, moss-draped tree. Red hair, worn leather armor, two swords crossed neatly at her back, and an expression that suggested she had already, in the space of about four seconds, formed several conclusions about you, none of them flattering to your survival odds.
You pointed the stick at her without hesitation. “Stay back.”
The woman looked at the stick. Then at you. Then, with the particular slowness of someone deciding whether this was worth the effort, back at the stick.
“Terrifying,” she said.
“I know how to use this.”
“You genuinely don’t.”
“How would you know that?”
“You’re holding it backwards.”
You glanced down. “There is no backwards. It’s a stick.”
“There is, in fact, very much a backwards, and you’ve found it.”
You narrowed your eyes at her, mostly to disguise the fact that you had absolutely no rebuttal prepared. “The Queen sent you.”
“She did.”
You let out a long, put-upon sigh. “Of course she did.”
“She’s worried about you.”
“She’s always worried about me. It’s practically her second occupation, after ruling the kingdom.”
“You did climb into a cursed forest, evade your own guards, and vanish for a day and a half. I’d argue the worry is, on this particular occasion, warranted.”
“I wanted to see it,” you said, as though that settled the matter entirely. “I’ve wanted to see it for years. She wouldn’t let me, so I decided to see it anyway.”
“It’s trying to kill you.”
“I’d noticed.”
The woman glanced past you toward the rabbit, one eyebrow rising with obvious skepticism. “Were you interrogating wildlife when I arrived?”
“He knows something. He’s been watching me since dawn. It’s suspicious.”
“He is a rabbit.”
“A suspicious rabbit.”
“Right,” the woman said, in the exact tone Wanda’s advisors used when they had decided arguing further was pointless. “You’re not going to be taken back yet, I assume.”
“Not until I’ve at least seen the ruins.”
“What ruins?”
“Precisely. I don’t know either. That’s rather the point of exploring, isn’t it? Finding out.”
The woman stared at you for a long moment, something almost like reluctant admiration flickering behind her eyes before she buried it beneath a far more familiar dryness. “You climbed out of a palace window, outran your own guard, rode into a forest half the kingdom refuses to name after dark, and got yourself lost, all because you wanted to sightsee.”
“I did not get lost.”
“You’re holding a stick you’ve clearly named.”
“His name is Gerald,” you said, with dignity. “And I have not gotten lost. I have simply temporarily misplaced the road.”
“That is the precise definition of being lost.”
“It’s the precise definition of exploring, and I’d thank you not to conflate the two.”
The woman exhaled slowly, and you thought, for one alarming second, that she might actually be trying not to smile. “Your Majesty—”
“Don’t call me that.”
She paused. “Why not?”
“You sound like the guards.”
“You mean the guards you make a career of evading?”
“They hover. It’s exhausting. I can’t so much as sneeze without three reports being filed.”
“That might be because you keep disappearing.”
“I always come back,” you said, and something flickered, very briefly, across the woman’s face, gone before you could name it. You didn’t notice, because Wanda had said those exact words to you a hundred times, usually while holding you far tighter than the sentiment strictly required. You always come back. It had never once occurred to you that the words might land differently on someone else’s ears.
The woman exhaled again, longer this time. “We’re leaving.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Y/N.”
“Natasha,” you said, testing the name, and something in her stilled at the sound of it in your voice.
“You know who I am.”
“Of course I do.” You brightened, momentarily forgetting the argument entirely. “You’re the one Wanda complains about at every council meeting she thinks I’m too bored to be paying attention to.”
“That doesn’t concern you? Standing in a forest, alone, with a woman half the northern kingdoms are frightened of?”
“Should it? You used to bring her honey pastries whenever you visited. She told me. She complains about the visits constantly, but she never once complained about the pastries.”
Natasha stared at you. “She talks about me?”
“Endlessly. Mostly to grumble.”
“That sounds about right, honestly.”
You had already turned, wandering a few determined steps deeper into the trees, when Natasha caught the back of your cloak and hauled you unceremoniously backward.
“Natasha!”
“Wrong direction.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
“Because that direction contains several things that would very much enjoy eating you.”
You pointed elsewhere. “That way, then?”
“Also things that eat people.”
“That way?”
“Worse things that eat people.”
You frowned at the trees as though they had personally offended you. “Why would anyone build a kingdom this close to a forest that eats its visitors?”
“I have asked myself that question with some regularity.”
A long, low howl rolled through the trees somewhere behind you, and you found yourself half a step closer to Natasha before you had consciously decided to move. She noticed. You pretended, with considerable effort, that you hadn’t noticed her noticing.
“So,” you said, your voice not quite as steady as you would have liked. “We’re leaving now.”
Natasha’s mouth curved, just slightly. “I thought you wanted to explore.”
“I’ve explored sufficiently for one lifetime.”
“Mm.”
“You won’t tell Wanda about any of this.”
“I am absolutely telling Wanda every single detail of this, starting with the branch.”
“Traitor.”
“Professional,” Natasha corrected.
****
Leaving the Black Forest proved considerably harder than entering it ever had. By the time night fell, Natasha had dispatched two shadow creatures, one spider of genuinely alarming proportions, and something neither of you could adequately describe afterward without your voices climbing several octaves. You had, for your part, contributed mainly by screaming with impressive volume directly into her ear at every available opportunity.
“Did that scream truly need to happen directly against my skull?”
“It had six legs, Natasha!”
“It was a spider. Spiders customarily have eight.”
She paused, glancing back at the retreating shadow with the faint furrow of someone recalculating an assumption. “…Good point, actually.”
You stared at her. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“What was it, then, if not a spider?”
“I genuinely don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Would it improve your evening if I lied to you convincingly?”
“Enormously.”
“It was a very large squirrel.”
You glared at her with real feeling. Natasha laughed, properly laughed, unguarded, a sound that seemed to surprise even her. And something in your chest turned over at having caused it.
That was how it began. Not the prophecy. Not the war that would nearly follow it. Not the tangled, three-cornered misunderstanding that would very nearly cost all three of you everything before it saved you.
Something quieter began first, in the space of a burned campfire and an unnecessarily loud scream about a squirrel. Something Natasha did not recognize for what it was until it was already far too late to talk herself out of it.
She taught you how to hold a knife properly, correcting your grip with a patience she rarely extended to anyone. You taught her, in return, which berries could be eaten and which would make an assassin who could reportedly kill five men with a spoon spend an unpleasant night regretting her choices. Because, astonishingly, the terror of three kingdoms turned out to be hopeless at identifying plant life.
You complained, at length, about sleeping on the ground. She complained, with equal length, about your complaining.
You told her stories by the fire, and most of them, without your quite meaning them to, circled back to Wanda.
“She hates pears,” you told her one night.
“She insists she doesn’t.”
“She’s lying. I’ve known her long enough to know when she’s lying.”
“That is somehow both entirely believable and deeply concerning.”
You smiled. “She snores, you know.”
Natasha stopped walking entirely. “She does not.”
“She absolutely does.”
“Wanda Maximoff does not snore. I refuse to accept that.”
“How would you even know one way or the other?”
Natasha’s silence was answer enough. You pressed anyway, delighted. “How do you know?”
Your own face went warm before you’d fully thought the sentence through. “We’ve — shared a bed. Once or twice.”
Natasha turned, very slowly, and stared at you with an expression you couldn’t quite read.
“She’s technically my stepmother, you know,” you added, quickly.
She kept staring.
“During storms, mostly. She doesn’t like them. And once when she was ill and wouldn’t admit it and I refused to leave until she slept properly.”
Natasha said nothing at all, which was somehow worse than if she’d said something.
“Stop making that face.”
“I’m not making a face.”
“You are absolutely making a face.”
She resumed walking, and a few paces on, with the studied casualness of someone who had clearly been holding the question in for some time, asked, “Does she cuddle?”
“Natasha.”
“I’m simply curious about the Queen’s private habits. For strategic purposes.”
You threw a berry at her without looking. She caught it out of the air without breaking stride, which felt, somehow, deeply unfair.
By the eighth night together in the forest, Natasha had become entirely certain of several things, in the particular way she catalogued most truths. Quietly, thoroughly, and with no small amount of dread.
One: you adored Wanda, hopelessly and without any apparent awareness of the fact.
Two: Wanda, in her own guarded, complicated way, adored you back just as hopelessly.
Three: neither of you appeared to have noticed either half of that equation.
Four: this was, unmistakably, about to become Natasha’s problem.
And five, you laughed at something she’d said, head thrown back, entirely unguarded, and Natasha found herself watching the line of your throat rather than the fire.
Five was becoming a very serious problem indeed.
****
Back at the palace, Wanda was slowly losing what remained of her composure.
You had been gone for nine days.
Nine.
Wanda had counted every sunrise.
Natasha had disappeared into the Black Forest after you eight days ago, and since then there had been no word from either of you. No sightings. No messages. Nothing. Natasha's silence frightened Wanda almost as much as yours.
Every hour that passed, her magic grew a little less steady beneath her skin, and every hour, the Mirror’s words repeated themselves in her mind with the patient cruelty of a wound that refused to close.
Her innocence and her purity are all that can destroy you.
She is also your salvation.
You must have her heart.
She stood before the Mirror at last, unable to bear the not-knowing a moment longer. “Show me.”
The gold rippled, and you appeared within it. Seated beside a fire, alive, unharmed, laughing at something just beyond the frame. Wanda very nearly sank to her knees with the relief of it.
Then Natasha entered the image, settling beside you. Too close, Wanda thought, and hated herself immediately for thinking it. You said something Wanda couldn’t hear. Natasha smiled, really smiled. The rare, unguarded one Wanda had once, a lifetime ago, believed belonged to her alone.
Then Natasha reached forward and brushed a stray leaf from your hair, and her hand lingered there, gentle, a heartbeat too long to be nothing at all.
Wanda went utterly still. She doesn’t know what she is feeling. Or she does but she doesn’t want to name it.
It was jealousy, plain and ugly, and she couldn't say for certain who it belonged to — you, or Natasha, or the space growing between the two of you that no longer seemed to have room for her.
“The Huntsman,” the Mirror said quietly, “has begun to surrender her heart.”
“What?” Wanda’s voice came out sharper than she intended.
Silence.
“What does that mean?”
Nothing.
She pointed at Natasha’s image with a hand that trembled, just slightly. “What heart, Mirror? Whose?”
The gold said nothing at all, and Wanda’s expression darkened into something dangerously close to a storm. “Oh,” she said, very quietly, to no one at all. “Absolutely not.”
****
The next morning, you woke with your head resting against Natasha’s shoulder. Neither of you moved for a long moment.
You cracked one eye open. Natasha was already awake, watching the fire, and had clearly been so for some time.
“Good morning.”
You sat up so fast you nearly toppled sideways. “I fell asleep.”
“That is, in fact, generally what happens at night.”
“On you.”
“I noticed.”
“Why didn’t you move me?”
“You looked comfortable,” Natasha said, with a careful lightness that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “It seemed unkind to disturb you.”
You stared at her. She looked back, and for a moment neither of you said anything at all, something shifting quietly and almost imperceptibly in the space between you.
“Natasha.”
“Hm?”
“Why did Wanda really send you?”
Her expression changed instantly — the question she had clearly been dreading since the moment she found you. “She was worried.”
“That isn’t the whole answer.”
“No,” Natasha admitted. “It isn’t.”
You waited. She looked toward the fire instead of at you.
“The Mirror spoke about you.”
Your stomach dropped. “Wanda’s Mirror?”
“Yes.”
“What did it say?”
A long hesitation. “That you could destroy her.”
Your face fell.
“And that you’re also her salvation.”
“That sounds needlessly dramatic, even for a prophecy.”
“It’s Wanda’s mirror. Dramatic seems to be a design feature.”
You allowed yourself a small, unwilling breath of a laugh before it died in your throat. “There’s more, isn’t there.”
Natasha looked at you at last. “It told her she needs your heart.”
You went very quiet. Your fingers curled into the edge of your cloak. “Oh.”
Natasha closed her eyes briefly, already regretting the honesty. “Y/N—”
“So that’s why she sent you. To bring me back so she could—” You couldn’t finish it.
“She didn’t send me here to kill you.”
“But she believes she might have to.”
Natasha said nothing, and the silence was answer enough. Your eyes filled before you could stop them.
“She wouldn’t. Wanda wouldn’t do that.”
“I know.”
“She wouldn’t hurt me, Natasha. Not ever. Not for any prophecy.”
“I know that too.”
“Then why would she believe she had to?”
“Because she’s terrified,” Natasha said quietly.
“Of me?”
“Of losing you.”
You froze. “Those are not the same thing.”
“No,” Natasha agreed, stepping closer. “But try telling her that. She thinks everything she’s ever loved gets taken from her eventually. She’s spent twelve years convinced it’s only a matter of when, not if.”
Your voice softened, all the anger draining out of it at once, replaced by something far more aching. “I know. I’ve always known that about her.” You looked away, toward the trees. “I wasn’t running from her, Natasha. I need you to understand that. I was only going home. In my own time, in my own way, the way I always do.”
“I know.”
“She’s going to be furious.”
The corner of Natasha’s mouth lifted, despite everything. “Extraordinarily.”
You almost smiled. Almost. Then your gaze dropped, and the fear crept back in. “What if she believes the Mirror before she believes me?”
Natasha stepped closer still, close enough that you had to tilt your face up to hold her gaze. “Then she will have to go through me first.”
“Why do you care so much?”
There it was, the question Natasha had been dreading since the moment she’d first seen you threatening a rabbit with a stick and had felt, entirely against her better judgment, something in her chest quietly rearrange itself.
She could have lied. She had built entire careers, entire lives, out of far smaller lies than this one.
Instead, she said, very quietly, “You already know why.”
Your breath caught. Her hand rose to your cheek, slow enough that you could have stepped back. You didn’t.
Neither did she.
You kissed her first, softly, carefully, as though the moment might shatter if either of you moved too quickly. And for one perfect, suspended second, nothing in the world existed except the warmth of it.
Then something sharp jabbed Natasha directly in the cheek.
“Ow.”
You jumped back. “What?”
“Your hair has apparently declared war on my face.”
“What about it?”
Natasha reached in and drew out an offending twig with the grim satisfaction of a woman removing an arrow. “You have an entire forest living in there.”
You stared at the twig, mortified. She stared back, and then, entirely without meaning to, you began laughing. The kind of laughter that undercuts every serious moment it touches and somehow makes it more precious for the interruption.
“Give me that,” you managed.
Natasha kissed you again instead, and you laughed against her mouth, and neither of you noticed the faint shimmer of red gathering silently between the trees a short distance away, watching everything.
****
Wanda saw it all.
Of course she did. The Mirror gave her no choice, showing her every second of it whether she wished to see it or not. Natasha’s hand at your cheek, your fingers curling into the front of her armor, the twig, the laughter, the second kiss.
She stood alone in the throne room and watched jealousy uncoil through her chest, accepting it now, sharp and ugly and entirely unfamiliar in its intensity. She recognized it instantly for what it was. She hated that she recognized it so easily.
“Stop,” she said.
The image remained.
“Stop showing me this.”
It vanished at last, and Wanda stood trembling in the sudden dark.
“The first heart has been given,” the Mirror said.
She spun toward it. “What?”
“There are three.”
“Three what?”
Silence, again, always silence, exactly when she needed an answer most.
“What does that mean?”
The Mirror dissolved without another word, and Wanda screamed loudly enough that three guards stationed well beyond the throne room doors would later, quietly, reconsider their career choices.
She entered the Black Forest herself before the sun had fully set.
****
Natasha felt Wanda coming before she ever saw her. The trees along the tree line began to blush crimson at the edges. The air thickened, charged, humming faintly with a pressure that made the hair along your arms rise.
Natasha was on her feet instantly. You looked around, uneasy. “What is that?”
Natasha exhaled slowly. “Your mommy, apparently.”
“My what—”
There was no time to finish the question. Scarlet light tore through the trees in a wave, and Wanda appeared at the center of it, cloak snapping behind her, eyes burning red with a magic that had clearly been barely restrained the entire ride there.
Your face lit despite everything. “Wanda!”
Then you saw her expression, and the word died in your throat.
Wanda’s gaze found you first. Alive, whole, unharmed, and something in her softened for the length of a single unguarded breath. Then her eyes moved to Natasha standing beside you, and the softness vanished entirely.
“You kissed her.”
Natasha blinked, genuinely startled. Of every accusation she had braced for on the ride here, that had not been among them. “Wanda—”
“You kissed her.”
You looked between the two of them, bewildered. “How could you possibly know that?”
Neither woman so much as glanced at you.
Natasha folded her arms, recovering her composure with visible effort. “Is that truly the most pressing concern at the moment, given the circumstances?”
“You were sent to bring her home.”
“I was in the process of doing precisely that.”
“With your mouth?”
You made a small, strangled sound of protest. “Well—”
Natasha, despite herself, looked almost impressed. “That was, I’ll admit, a rather good line.”
“Do not compliment me right now.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“Wanda.”
Both women turned to you at last. You crossed your arms, drawing yourself up with as much dignity as several days in a forest allowed. “I was coming home. On my own. I always come home.”
Wanda’s fury faltered. “What?”
“I wasn’t escaping you.”
“You went into the Black Forest, Y/N.”
“I wanted to see it. I’ve wanted to see it for years, and you kept telling me no, and I got tired of waiting for permission I was never going to be given.”
“You wanted to—” Wanda stopped. Her face went abruptly, completely blank, the fury draining out of it and leaving something far more frightened behind.
Natasha slowly covered her mouth with one hand.
You kept going, unaware of the shift. “I only meant to be gone for a day.”
“You climbed out of your own window.”
“The guards refused to let me leave through the door, so I found another way. That’s hardly a crime.”
“BECAUSE I INSTRUCTED THEM NOT TO LET YOU ANYWHERE NEAR THAT CURSED FOREST!”
“Which was, respectfully, an unreasonable instruction.”
“There are monsters in there!”
“I’m aware of that now, thank you, several of them made quite an impression.”
“You always seem to know these things after the fact, never before!”
Natasha made a small, strangled sound that might generously be called a cough.
Wanda rounded on her. “Do not laugh.”
“I am not laughing.”
“You very much are.”
“I am doing an admirable job of not laughing, which is different, and I’d like some credit for the effort.”
You stepped closer to Wanda, your own anger softening as quickly as it had risen. “Did you truly think I ran away from you?”
Wanda’s carefully composed expression cracked at last. She looked away, toward the trees, unable to meet your eyes. “I thought you had heard about the prophecy,” she said, quietly. “I thought you knew what the Mirror told me. I thought you finally understood what I am, and what I might have to become, and that you’d run because you were afraid of me at last, the way you should have been afraid of me from the very beginning.”
Your heart broke cleanly in half. “Wanda.”
She finally lifted her eyes to yours, and the fear there was unmistakable, raw and entirely unguarded in a way Wanda Maximoff almost never allowed herself to be.
“I would never run from you,” you said. “Not for any prophecy. Not for anything.”
Her breath caught audibly.
Natasha cleared her throat, gently, into the silence that followed. “As touching as this reunion is, we do still have the small matter of the heart-related murder prophecy to resolve.”
Wanda’s expression darkened again, though this time with dread rather than fury. You took a small step back.
“Wanda. Is it true?”
She looked, for the first time since you’d known her, genuinely terrified, and not of you. For you.
“The Mirror told me your heart would restore my power,” she said, the words dragged out of her like splinters. “But I won’t do it. I don’t care what happens to me, or to my magic, or to this entire kingdom. I will not hurt you. I spent every hour since the Mirror spoke, trying to convince myself there was another meaning, another way to read it, anything at all that didn’t end with your blood on my hands, and I couldn’t find one, and I came here anyway because I would rather lose my power than lose you, and if my survival requires yours, then I don’t want it. I never wanted it at that price.”
You stared at her, throat tight. “Wanda—”
“If my life requires yours,” she said again, quieter now, “then I don’t want it.”
Natasha looked away entirely, giving you both what privacy she could in a clearing with no walls, and for once had absolutely nothing sharp left to say.
You took a small step towards Wanda.
You didn't reach for her hand.
You reached for her face instead, both palms framing her jaw the way you had a hundred times before in memory but never quite like this, and you kissed her.
There was no hesitation in it. No permission asked. Just the accumulated weight of years finally allowed to land. Every morning you'd kissed her cheek and called it nothing, just a daughter greeting her stepmother. Every night you'd lain awake in the northern wing thinking of her and told yourself it was only fondness, every time she'd said you always come back like it was a fear and not a promise.
Wanda went rigid with shock for exactly one heartbeat.
Then she kissed you back like something in her had finally stopped fighting itself.
The forest exploded with light.
Scarlet magic burst outward in a wave, and every dead flower within sight bloomed at once. The trees around you straightened, as though drawing a long-held breath. Birdsong erupted from branches that had gone silent for decades. Natasha threw an arm up over her face.
“What in the world—”
Wanda gasped against your mouth, and her magic surged through her stronger and steadier than it had felt in months, in years, humming beneath her skin like something finally allowed to breathe freely instead of clawing to survive. She pulled back only far enough to look at you, eyes wide, chaos magic still trembling faintly at her fingertips where they'd found their way into your hair without her quite deciding to put them there.
"Oh," she whispered, as though the word had been startled out of her.
You stared at her, breathless. "Was that—"
"I don't know," Wanda said, which was, for a woman who always knew everything, answer enough in itself.
Natasha, recovering first, said slowly, “I believe it’s time all three of us had a very pointed conversation with that mirror.”
****
After returning to the castle, all three of you stood before it together.
Wanda looked murderous. Natasha looked, quite openly, delighted. You looked, understandably, nervous.
The Mirror emerged, gold rippling into its familiar faceless shape, and Wanda wasted no time.
“You told me I needed her heart.”
“Yes.”
“You told me it was my salvation.”
“Yes.”
“You told me having it in my hand would restore my power.”
“Yes.”
Wanda’s eye twitched violently. “You meant I had to kill her.”
“No.”
The silence that followed was absolute.
Natasha turned away first, her shoulders beginning to shake with the effort of holding herself together.
Wanda stared. “What?”
“I never once instructed you to kill the Princess.”
“You said I needed her heart.”
“Yes.”
“IN MY HAND.”
“If you were fortunate,” the Mirror repeated, with what Natasha would later swear was smugness.
Natasha made a sound that was no longer remotely a cough. You clapped both hands over your mouth. Wanda looked between the two of you, betrayal blooming plainly across her face.
“Why are you both laughing?”
Natasha lost the battle entirely. “Because—” She had to bend at the waist. “Oh, this is unbelievable. You thought—” Another wave overtook her. “You genuinely thought he meant it literally.”
“HE SAID HEART.”
“People say that romantically all the time, Wanda, it is an extremely common phrase!”
“I AM A WITCH. I DEAL IN LITERAL HEARTS ON A REGULAR BASIS. FORGIVE ME FOR NOT ASSUMING METAPHOR.”
You made the fatal mistake of laughing as well. Wanda turned on you next, looking thoroughly betrayed by the universe at large. “You too?”
“I’m sorry.”
“You are clearly not sorry in the slightest.”
“No,” you admitted. “Not remotely.”
The Mirror, entirely unbothered by the chaos it had caused, continued as though none of you had spoken at all.
“The Princess’s heart cannot be taken.”
Wanda slowly turned back toward it.
“It must be given.”
Silence again, though a different kind this time. You stopped laughing.
The Mirror turned its faceless gaze toward you. “The Princess gave hers long ago.”
Your entire face went hot. Natasha’s laughter faded into something far more curious as she looked at you properly. Wanda simply stared.
“What?”
You covered your face with both hands. “No.”
“Y/N.”
“Please don’t make me say it out loud.”
Natasha looked delighted all over again. “Oh, this just keeps getting better.”
“Natasha.”
“I’m sorry. Truly. Continue.”
Wanda stepped in front of you, gently pulling your hands away from your face. “You gave me your heart.”
“You’re making it sound very dramatic.”
“It is dramatic.”
“You have always been dramatic, this is hardly new information.”
“I believed I was going to have to kill you because of it!”
“Yes, all right, that part is admittedly slightly more dramatic than the average declaration of love.”
Wanda stared at you, something raw and disbelieving breaking open across her face. Your own expression softened.
“I’ve loved you for years, Wanda. I think I have loved you since I was young enough that I didn’t have another word for it yet, and by the time I found the word, it felt far too enormous and far too late to say out loud.”
Everything went quiet. Natasha’s teasing smile faded into something gentler as she watched you both.
“You never told me,” Wanda whispered.
“I thought you knew.”
“How would I have known?”
“I learned Sokovian for you.”
“That could easily have meant friendship.”
“I slept in your bed during every storm for a decade.”
“We were both cold, and the fires in this castle are notoriously unreliable.”
“I kissed your cheek every single morning for years, Wanda.”
“You are, and have always been, an affectionate person by nature.”
“I told you I loved you constantly.”
“You tell everyone you love them constantly, it is practically your signature greeting.”
Natasha raised one hand slowly. “In fairness, she does have something of a point there.”
You shot her a withering look. “Not helping.”
Wanda looked, all at once, utterly devastated by her own obliviousness. “I am an idiot.”
Natasha nodded gravely. “Yes.”
“Romanoff.”
“My apologies. Please, continue.”
The Mirror, apparently unwilling to let the moment settle for long, spoke again. “The Queen’s salvation remains incomplete.”
Wanda closed her eyes. “Of course it does.”
Natasha sighed. “What now?”
“The Huntsman carries the second heart.”
Natasha froze entirely. “No.”
Wanda turned to look at her. You turned as well.
Natasha pointed at the Mirror with real accusation. “No.”
“You love the Princess.”
“That much was hardly a secret by this point,” Natasha said, folding her arms defensively.
“And the Queen.”
Complete silence descended over the throne room.
Natasha stared at the Mirror. Wanda stared at Natasha. You stared at both of them.
“Incorrect,” Natasha finally managed.
The Mirror said nothing at all.
“No,” Natasha said again, more quietly this time.
Wanda’s lips parted slowly. “Natasha.”
“Don’t.”
“You love—”
“No.”
“You love me.”
Natasha tipped her head back, addressing the trees above as though seeking divine intervention. “This has genuinely been a terrible week.”
You bit your lip to keep from smiling. Wanda’s expression had gone entirely, unbearably smug.
Natasha pointed at her immediately. “Do not make that face.”
“What face?”
“That exact face.”
“I have no idea what you’re referring to.”
“You absolutely do.”
The Mirror turned its attention to you at last. “The third heart belongs to the Princess.”
You frowned. “I thought mine was the first.”
“You carry the third bond.”
You blinked, and then, slowly, understood. “Oh.”
Natasha looked at you. Wanda looked at you. You looked between the two of them, feeling suddenly, thoroughly cornered.
“This is somewhat awkward.”
Natasha let out a short, disbelieving laugh. “That is certainly one word for it.”
Wanda went very still. “You love her too.”
You nodded.
“And me.”
You swallowed hard, and nodded again.
Wanda stared between the two of you. Natasha looked, for once in her life, entirely without a clever remark to offer.
You crossed your arms, gathering what courage you had left. “This would be considerably easier if the two of you would stop acting as though someone here has to lose something. I love Wanda.” Wanda’s eyes softened instantly. “And I love Natasha.” Natasha’s did too, in a way she clearly hadn’t intended to let show. “And from what this insufferable golden man is telling us, the two of you have apparently been in love with each other for years and far too proud to admit it to yourselves, let alone to each other.”
Natasha choked audibly. Wanda looked scandalized.
“I have not.”
“You absolutely have.”
Natasha nodded slowly. “She has.”
“You do not get to agree with her.”
“You’ve loved me for years?” Wanda repeated, quieter now, and Natasha realized, half a second too late, precisely what she’d let slip.
You smiled. “Oh.”
Natasha closed her eyes, resigned. “I hate both of you, thoroughly and completely.”
“No,” you said gently, “you very clearly don’t.”
Wanda smiled. Natasha glared at her, then, despite every effort to the contrary, smiled back.
You reached out and took one of Wanda’s hands, then one of Natasha’s, and joined them together between you. Both women looked down at their linked fingers, and then at each other, years of unspoken history passing quietly between them — old friendship, old affection, old wounds neither had ever found a way to name aloud until this exact moment.
Natasha exhaled. “Wanda.”
“Hm?”
“If you ever throw me into a tree again—”
“I have never thrown you into a tree.”
“Yet,” Natasha said pointedly.
Wanda’s mouth curved. “I will endeavor to restrain myself.”
“See that you do.”
You squeezed both their hands at once. The Mirror had already begun to dissolve, its golden form thinning at the edges like mist at sunrise.
“Wait,” Wanda said sharply.
The figure paused, half-formed.
“My power,” she said. “Explain it. Properly, this time, without riddles.”
“It was never dying,” the Mirror said. “It was changing.”
“What does that mean?”
“Your magic was built upon grief, and fear, and survival. It is difficult to sustain power on a foundation of nothing but loss.” A pause, and something almost like amusement flickered through its golden features. "What broke through it in that forest was, by every old and tiresome definition your kingdoms still tell their children at bedtime, a true love's kiss."
Natasha made a strangled sound. "I'm sorry — a what?"
"You heard him," Wanda muttered, pressing two fingers to her temple.
The mirror’s gaze then shifted toward you. “Her love did not restore it.”
Then toward Natasha. “Theirs changed what fed it.”
The golden figure dissolved fully into the morning light. “That is salvation, Queen. Not a heart taken. A heart offered, and accepted, and returned in kind.”
And then it was simply gone.
Natasha sighed, long and heartfelt. “I have never in my life hated a prophecy so thoroughly.”
Wanda, for once, nodded in complete agreement. “For once, Romanoff, we are entirely of one mind.”
You smiled at them both. “I liked it, personally.”
Both women turned to you as one. “No.”
****
Months later, the kingdom had grown accustomed to a great many new arrangements.
The Queen frequently vanished from council sessions because the Princess had discovered something “interesting” and refused to wait even an hour for the meeting to end.
The Huntsman frequently vanished from the barracks because she had, inevitably, been sent to retrieve the both of them. And the royal guard had, at long last, entirely stopped attempting to prevent the Princess from sneaking out at night. Mostly because Wanda had finally, grudgingly, accepted that the effort had never once succeeded in twelve years and was unlikely to begin succeeding now.
Instead, she simply assigned Natasha to the task.
This had not gone according to plan.
One morning, Wanda entered your chambers to find them entirely empty. She closed her eyes, already suspecting the answer before she’d finished asking the question. “No.”
She checked Natasha’s rooms next. Also empty.
Wanda stared at the ceiling as though it might offer counsel. “Unbelievable.”
A folded note sat waiting on the table.
Went exploring. Natasha is with me, so please don’t send the army — she’s armed, I’m resourceful, and between the two of us we have survived considerably worse than whatever you’re currently imagining. Love you. Back by supper, probably.
Beneath it, in Natasha’s slanted hand: I did try to talk her out of it.
Beneath that: No, you didn’t.
Beneath that, in Natasha’s writing again: …Correct. I did not try particularly hard.
Wanda stood there for a long moment, staring at the note, feeling something in her chest that had once been fear settle, instead, into something warmer and far more familiar. Then, quietly, alone in your empty chambers, she began to laugh.
That evening, the two of you returned muddy, exhausted, and thoroughly pleased with yourselves. Natasha carried a sack of apples that had, quite obviously, been stolen. Wanda was waiting at the gates, arms crossed, an expression of practiced severity already prepared.
“Hello,” you offered.
“Where, precisely, were you?”
“Exploring.”
“Of course you were.”
Natasha held up the sack helpfully. “We brought a gift.”
“Those are stolen directly from my orchard.”
“Our orchard,” you corrected, with great satisfaction.
Wanda turned her glare on Natasha, who immediately raised both hands. “Don’t look at me. I merely followed.”
“You are, at this exact moment, holding the evidence.”
“That’s entrapment, and I intend to file a formal complaint.”
You grinned, unrepentant. Wanda tried, valiantly, to hold on to her displeasure, and failed within seconds. You crossed the last few steps and kissed her cheek. “Missed you.”
Her expression softened instantly, helplessly, unfairly.
Natasha smirked from a safe distance. “Pathetic.”
Wanda reached out, seized her by the collar, and kissed her thoroughly enough to erase the smirk entirely. Natasha blinked, momentarily stunned into silence, and you laughed at the sight of it.
“Still pathetic?” Wanda asked, once she’d released her.
Natasha, recovering, managed, “Extremely,” and then kissed her back with considerably more enthusiasm than the complaint suggested.
You watched them both, warmth spreading slowly through your chest. Wanda noticed, and reached for you without breaking away from Natasha, drawing you into the circle of both of them at once. Three women tangled together beneath the palace gates while the guards on duty developed a sudden, deeply committed fascination with the horizon.
****
Later, curled together in Wanda’s enormous bed, Natasha propped herself on one elbow and glanced toward the golden Mirror standing quiet across the room.
“Can I ask it something?”
“No,” Wanda said immediately, without opening her eyes.
Natasha ignored her entirely. “Mirror.”
The gold stirred. Wanda groaned into her pillow. “What now?”
The faceless figure emerged, patient as ever. Natasha propped herself higher, entirely too pleased with herself. “When you told Wanda she needed Y/N’s heart—”
Wanda pressed both hands over her face. “Natasha, please, not this again.”
“—did you already know she was going to misunderstand you completely?”
The Mirror said nothing at all.
Natasha’s eyes narrowed with delight. “Did you?”
Still nothing.
You began laughing before you could stop yourself. Wanda lowered her hands slowly, staring at the Mirror with dawning, righteous outrage. “You knew.”
Silence.
“You knew, and you let me believe I might have to kill her.”
Nothing at all.
Wanda hurled a pillow across the room with real feeling. It passed directly through the golden surface without resistance. Natasha laughed until she nearly toppled off the bed entirely.
“I believe,” she managed, “that’s a yes.”
“You very nearly caused an entirely preventable murder.”
The Mirror, entirely unrepentant, finally spoke. “The Queen was provided with all necessary information. What she chose to do with it was, as ever, entirely her own doing.”
Natasha collapsed backward, laughing too hard now to properly breathe. You buried your face against Wanda’s shoulder, shaking with it. Wanda looked personally, thoroughly betrayed by the entire universe and every oracle in it.
“I hate him.”
“You love him,” you mumbled into her shoulder.
“I do not.”
Natasha, wiping at her eyes, added helpfully, “Perhaps you’re the one who has his heart, in the end.”
Wanda threw the second pillow with considerably more force than the first. Natasha caught it easily, still laughing, and you were laughing too hard yourself by then to breathe properly at all.
Eventually, Wanda gave up the fight entirely and sank back against the pillows with a long, resigned exhale. You curled against her at once, and Natasha settled at your other side, her hand finding Wanda’s over the curve of your waist, their fingers lacing together without either of them quite seeming to notice they’d done it.
For a while, none of you spoke at all.
Then, quietly, you asked, “Wanda?”
“Hm?”
“Did you truly believe I had run away from you? That night, in the forest?”
A pause. Wanda’s arm tightened slightly around you. “Yes.”
You turned toward her. “I would never do that. Not to you.”
“I know that now.”
“I always come back.”
Wanda looked at you for a long moment. Those words had frightened her for years, though she had never once said so aloud, because coming back always implied a leaving first, and because loving you had always meant accepting, however unwillingly, that she could never lock every gate tightly enough to keep the wide, dangerous world from reaching you eventually.
But perhaps, she thought, that had always been the true lesson buried beneath the prophecy, the one the Mirror had never bothered to spell out plainly because some truths could only be learned, never simply told.
Love was not a fortress built to keep someone in. It was not protection so fierce it curdled slowly into possession.
Love was opening the gate, however much it terrified you to do it, and trusting the person on the other side of it to choose, freely, to return.
Wanda pressed a kiss to your forehead. “I know.”
Natasha shifted closer, her voice warm against the quiet. “And if she ever doesn’t come back on her own, I’ll go and drag her home myself.”
You gasped, mock-offended. “Excuse me?”
“Professionally,” Natasha clarified, entirely unbothered.
“I am not luggage.”
“That is debatable.”
You elbowed her in the ribs. She only laughed, catching your hand and pressing a kiss to your knuckles by way of apology that wasn’t really an apology at all. Wanda smiled into your hair, and for the first time in longer than she could easily remember, felt no fear at all in doing so.
She glanced, finally, toward the Mirror. It remained still, gold and quiet and, for once, entirely without commentary.
For once, Wanda found she didn’t need to ask it anything further.
She understood, at last, what it had meant from the very beginning.
Take her heart.
How foolish she had been, and for how long. A heart was never a thing that could be cut free and kept, like a jewel pried loose from its setting. It was not proof of power, nor payment owed, nor salvation purchased with anyone’s blood, least of all yours.
A heart could only ever be offered.
And yours had been offered to her freely, quietly, patiently, long before Wanda had ever found the courage to recognize what she was being given. Natasha’s had been offered more reluctantly, buried for years beneath old scars and sharper wit, but offered all the same. And Wanda’s own, her guarded, grief-worn, hard-won heart, had taken the longest of the three to open at all.
But it had, in the end.
Not taken. Not divided. Not weighed against loss, as she had always feared love inevitably must be.
Given, freely, by all three of you, to all three of you.
Wanda looked at you, asleep now against her shoulder. Then at Natasha, drowsing at your other side, one hand still loosely curled around yours. The two women who had somehow, against every fear she’d carried out of the war and into the crown, become both her greatest vulnerability and the safest place she had ever known.
The Queen whispered, so quietly she thought neither would hear, “I love you.”
You stirred, half-asleep, and murmured, “Which one?”
Wanda blinked. “Which one what?”
“You said I love you. Which one of us did you mean?”
“Both,” Wanda said, without a moment’s hesitation.
Natasha, eyes still closed, smiled faintly against the pillow. “Good answer.”
You laughed softly, already drifting back toward sleep. Wanda rolled her eyes, entirely fond, and drew both of you closer still.
Outside, the kingdom slept on, peaceful and unaware. Inside, the Scarlet Queen lay at last with the Princess she had once tried far too hard to protect and the Huntsman she had once sent to retrieve her, and found, in the quiet space between the two of you, something she had spent twelve long years convinced she would never be permitted to keep.
And if the palace servants occasionally still whispered, the following morning, that the Princess had once again been seen climbing out of a window well after midnight, well…
That part, at least, remained entirely true.
The only real difference now was that the Queen and the Huntsman, more often than not, climbed out right after her.
@dollysplace5
