The price of power

When Wanda had looked into the future and mused on what she would do with absolute power, there had been a lot of things that had crossed her mind.

She’d imagined going back to Sokovia and walking the streets where she’d grown up - it was bombed to rubble now, of course, but it didn’t need to be. Reality was little more than a suggestion to her now. It would have been nice to see her old home again.

Or there were the people she’d lost, of course. She struggled to list all of them, sometimes.

When she’d first gotten the Darkhold, her children had been on her mind. She’d plotted and schemed for a way to reunite with them, because she was meant to - she was their mother, she was their protector, so it fell to her to find some solution. It wasn’t to say that they were all she wanted, but the Darkhold had a way of making her… focus.

Now, though, she considered so much more. There was Pietro, of course. There was Vision. Then others, from Steve, to friends whose names would never make it into the history books but who she cared for nonetheless. With a wave of her hand, she could re-create them from nothing.

Wanda waved her hand, focusing more intently: on the level her magic worked, facts didn’t matter so much as intention. Creating a barrier of light, or casting a spell of invisibility, or created a material object, it was all the same if her goal was to gain some semblance of modesty. All those things were individually trivial, but as soon as she tried to turn those skills to that one end, they all failed.

Wanda crouched on the cold stone floor of the temple. She’d dismissed the guardians, and Wong and Strange, effortlessly sending them back to Kamar-Taj to duke it out among themselves. For understandable reasons, she rather wanted to be alone just then.

She adjusted the matter of the temple floor from rigid stone, to a warm cushion, raising the ambient temperature a little so that the snow breeze wasn’t quite so bracing against her bare skin. Even that warping of reality was easy for her now.

She could change the colour of the stone too - she felt bizarrely conscious of just how much her pale skin stuck out against the dark backdrop, even if no one was here to see her. She turned the ominous temple a light beige, and made it warm enough to spend time nude in, and comfy enough to walk and kneel around in.

Awkwardly, she wriggled up on the altar, balancing the Book of the Damned on the back of a bare thigh and delicately crossing an arm over her breasts as she read the black scrawl within. It said everything that she already knew - a deepened connection with the source of chaos magic, a baring of her soul, and implicitly a baring of certain other things.

She could warp the shape of the temple, but not draw the once-stone up around her to cover herself. She could change the colour and brightness of the material, but couldn’t dim it enough to veil herself in shadow. Whatever she did, wherever she went, there was nothing Wanda could do but remain completely skyclad.

She could walk her home street again, so long as she didn’t mind the pavement under her bare feet, and the neighbours seeing every inch of her. She could re-unite with Pietro, only to be nude. She expected she could even whisk Natasha back from the Soul Stone’s clutches, at the cost of exposing herself to the redhead. She could bring back everyone she’d lost, go anywhere, save the world, and be a blushing, naked mess every time.

Wanda gulped.

She looked up from the book, to the statue of the Scarlet Witch. With all this power, surely there was some solution? The Book of the Damned contained a lot of spells. Maybe…

There was a sudden thundering. Wanda felt a faint echo before the storm hit.

A cataclysm ricocheted through the multiverse, centred on the very temple in which she now sat - she glimpsed another version of herself through microscopic cracks in reality, and heard a faint whisper.

“No more of this. No more of us corrupted by this.”

The temple shook. Wanda stumbled off of the altar, and the Darkhold in her lap burst into acrid, purple flames. Specks of ash fell from her legs as the once-monstrous Darkhold Castle fell apart all around her.

Somewhere in the multiverse, another version of her had lashed out, struck at the heart of the Darkhold - she’d erased it, every line and verse throughout the entire multiverse.

“No!” Wanda shouted.

Crimson wreathed her hands as she insistently plucked at the timelines, at reality. The Darkhold had to have some spell that could let her dress again, surely? The castle certainly would. If she could just…

But nothing happened. The ancient, dark magic was erased, leaving Wanda standing in among powerless rubble, bare to the mountain air. Awkwardly, she crossed her arms.

And there went her last hope to change this. Now all she could do was, well, live like this. Change the world, make it the best she could, and not wear a stitch during.

All the power in the world, and none of the modesty.