Fire and Smoke - Wanda Maximoff x Reader

Chapter 15

For the next two days, I am confined to my hospital bed, which shortens my temper drastically. No matter how I argue, the doctors are insisting they need to keep me in to make sure that the antibiotics they are pumping me full of are indeed working, and they seem to think that I might not take their advice to heart and stay in bed to rest my ribs were they to release me. I find that absolutely outrageous.

Agent Woo and Dr. Lewis have come in to visit me a few times, which I greatly appreciate. They manage to take my mind off of being confined to bed and keep me from wondering too much about what is happening to Maximoff. Especially Darcy (who has given me apparently special permission to drop the use of dr.) keeps me well occupied, listening to her very dramatic retellings of missions amongst gods and her work at S.W.O.R.D. (whom she is working with just to undermine, apparently) is insanely intriguing. I keep forgetting to pity myself when I listen to her. Another plus is that Darcy finds me pretty cool too.

Hayward came to visit me once. Our chat was short and curt, him wanting me to tell me everything about what happened with Maximoff while I was in her cabin, and me being very passive (in my opinion) aggressive about the way he handled Maximoff's arrest. After a few minutes of trying to get me to give him something he could actually use against Maximoff, Hayward apparently had enough of me and stormed off.

Once or twice, I closed my eyes and tried telepathically finding Maximoff, or rather, getting her to find me, but I remained alone in my head. Maybe it was, like she had told me, more difficult for her being surrounded by people and their thoughts to hear through the noise. Still, I somehow couldn't shake the strange feeling of not being told something. What that was became clear on the fourth, and final day at the hospital.

A doctor had come over to me to explain to me that they were (finally) discharging me, and tried to go over how I was supposed to continue my treatments at home, but I wasn't really listening, itching to get out of here. As I was walking out of the hospital, wearing clean clothes Darcy had kindly brought me the other day, my old, frankly rather smelly clothes in a clear bag under my arm, I walked past the corridor in which the two S.W.O.R.D. agents had been keeping guard, I noticed they were now gone. The room behind the closed door was now completely empty, no trace of its previous inhabitant anywhere to be found.

I wait outside of the hospital, looking around, wondering what on earth I am supposed to do now, when a black SUV pulls up in front of me, and the door in the back opens, revealing Agent Woo sitting in the back. He motions to me to get in, which I do, but not nearly as effortlessly as I would have done before my encounter with Maximoff.

"Where are we going?" I question Agent Woo as the driver in the front slams on the gas and the car jolts forward, quickly leaving the hospital behind.

"Home." Agent Woo says and I turn to look at him properly.

"What? We're leaving? But -" I begin and he shakes his head.

"We're done here. We did our job."

"We did... what? But, Maximoff?" I'm utterly confused.

"Maximoff has been apprehended and has been brought back already." Agent Woo says solemnly. I stare at him for a second, then look out of the tinted window, feeling oddly overlooked, for some reason. It was me who got to Maximoff, or did everyone just forget about that? Without me managing to put those cuffs on her she would still be galavanting around somewhere in the Transian wilderness.

"Look, you did good. But the FBI wants us back now. You need to get better and I've already been assigned to another case." Agent Woo sighs, quite possibly sounding just as disappointed as I feel.

And so, we travel in almost complete silence back to the US. This time, we aren't met by any private jets, but have to travel the cumbersome journey from the small airport in Transia to Budapest, from where we fly to Paris and then to D.C. Agent Woo tries to make some small talk during our journey, but the conversation just doesn't flow, and he seems relieved when we part ways at Dulles airport.