Fire and Smoke - Wanda Maximoff x Reader

Chapter 50

The endless cycle of being wiped clean continues, and I forget that there ever was anything before the chair. I'm slowly but surely wiped of anything and everything that used to be me. The first time I returned from the chair, I lied on the cold floor, not even able to cry, but able to still recall my life, still pry the memories from behind a thick dusty curtain. I remember the feeling I had when I graduated. I remember the pain when I held my niece. I remember kissing Wanda, and Wanda kissing me, and feeling like everything was just right for once being held in her arms. But no matter how hard I try to imagine her warmth wrapped around me and her voice in my ear, she's not here, and it's just a memory. And my memories leave me, one by one. Even Wanda leaves me.

I become as empty as cold as the cell I'm stuck inside. I'm taken back to the chair. I don't fight. Someone told me not to fight. The white-hot pain easily shoots through me, but there's nothing for it to attach itself onto. When I'm alone in my cell, I just sit there, not knowing what to do. I try remember who I am and why I am here, but this becomes harder and harder until everything about me is unreachable. I'm not a person who gets scared easily, but now all I am is scared. The first few times I return from the chair, I repeat my mantra over and over again to remind me of the most important things I can not afford to forget.

I am Olivia.

I work for the FBI.

I am stuck in the past.

I need Wanda.

My mantra is all I have, but now, everything has lost meaning. Even my mantra loses its meaning and I just repeat empty words that do not make me feel anything. I don't know who Olivia is, and I don't know any Wanda. I tried so hard to keep a hold of my memories that they slipped through my clenched fingers like water. And now I'm all dried up.

Then the chair takes on a new meaning, and instead of ripping away memories from me, it gives them. Memories that I might have known become something else, they're changed and strange. Distorted. The chair is always interested in my memories of a woman with red hair. The pain flips through each and every memory of her and takes them from me. I don't even know why that hurts my heart. I don't understand. When the pain returns the memories, they're not mine, but I accept them as though they were. I don't even remember the memories of the woman ever hurting my heart. Now the memories are horrifying. Now they fill me with rage. And fear. The memories show someone I should hate. Someone terrible.

Those are the memories that replay in my head when I lie curled up in my empty box. They replay and replay and I feel tired and scared and angry. And all of that is directed at the woman with red hair, whose eyes glow red.

A well-kept woman with brown hair she keeps in a bun visits me with guards who never look at me. She talks to me and helps me remember. She says it isn't important to remember who I was before. She says Hydra found me, saved me. Saved me from the red-haired woman with red eyes. I find myself looking forward to learning more from the woman with her hair in a bun. She helps me feel more secure, find footing. She tells me about Hydra, and she doesn't shut me out when I ask her who the woman with red eyes is. She tells me how Hydra saved me from her, and that she used to be like me, but she went insane, she disobeyed Hydra. She hurt people. And she wants to hurt more people. The more I learn about the woman with red eyes, the less I want to.

When the woman with the bun finally feels like I am strong enough, she allows me out of my cell without having to put on handcuffs. I get to train with the man with dark hair and silver arm. My body feels tired and weak, but just as my mind slowly gets put together, so does my body.

During my training passes with the man with the silver arm whom I know is called the Winter Soldier -a code name Hydra gave him, just like they give all of the people they help, we just fight, we don't talk.