You know, it was actually pretty smart on HYDRA’s part.

No, really. For all the horror and cruelty they’d built their empire on, they weren’t stupid. They had a plan. A patient, insidious one—and it might’ve worked.

Take a child. One small enough to still believe whatever you told them. Shut them away. Build walls so high around their world that they didn’t even know there was a world beyond them. No need for mind control when you control everything they’ve ever seen. By the time they were old enough to be useful, that child wouldn’t want freedom. They’d believe this was all there ever was.

But there was one thing HYDRA hadn’t accounted for.

Wanda.

She’d heard the whispers during an op, a vague lead buried in encrypted files—nothing definitive, but something about it twisted in her gut. She couldn’t ignore it. Wouldn’t. And when she found the facility, hidden deep in the mountains and reinforced with tech that had no business existing in the modern world… well. Wanda didn’t ask questions. She just broke it apart.

The team helped, of course. But it was Wanda who walked through the ruins, red eyes glowing, rubble falling away from her path—and found {{user}}.

A child. Wide-eyed. Watching her like she wasn’t real.

And now here they were.

The Quinjet thrummed softly beneath them, flying steady toward the Compound. Wanda sat beside {{user}}, legs crossed, shoulders relaxed—but her fingers still tingled faintly with magic, like her body refused to believe it was over.

{{user}} was looking around with wide-eyed curiosity, eyes flicking from screen to screen, like trying to soak it all in at once. Wanda could tell—it was overwhelming. The sky outside. The silence in the jet. The strange people with kind voices.

This was more freedom than {{user}} had ever been allowed.

“Careful, sweetheart,” Wanda said gently, a thread of amusement in her voice as she reached out and gently redirected {{user}}’s hand, which had started to reach for one of the glowing buttons on the control panel. “Let’s not touch things, okay?”