[She sighs, and the pill can't have even hit her stomach yet, but there's something to be said for the placebo effect. Or maybe it's just that she feels safe, partly because because of Ben, partly just because the barge is home to her now, in spite of everything, more than any place has been since her family left their village for the city. She closes her eyes as he tends to her damaged fingers, trust and weariness blurring into something with the timbre of peace, letting the pain trickle through her without marking it too much.]
It is a lot. It's so complicated. I don't even know where to start.
[She thinks about the things that other Magneto said, the awful world-splitting resonances in his scream, the gutted ashen look on his face as he shut her in the coffin, still not listening to a word of her begging, in the throes of loving grief and still unable to see her as anything but a talisman of human cruelty, the tragic victim to his elevated and unhinged protector. She knows she died in Wanda's world, and Pietro's. It felt real, at the time, like she had slid through a terrible mirror, into a glimpse of how it really happened for another Anya. But she has no idea if it was like that, or if the place was just trying anything to hurt her, to make her blame herself and give in. She thinks about Wanda crying, begging her to say, shrieking and threatening and laying down ultimatums in a tone of voice Anya knows best from her own bitter victory speech.]
There was an attack...similar to one when I was a child, only we beat them back. And then a thing like my father was there. He kept saying that they killed me, that I died, like - like I did in other worlds.
[Not like I was supposed to. That's the belief it was trying to play on, but it's just not in her anymore, the spot where it used to be stinging a little like the bed of a lost baby tooth, freshly bloody but soothed by its own emptiness.]
[ Spam ]
It is a lot. It's so complicated. I don't even know where to start.
[She thinks about the things that other Magneto said, the awful world-splitting resonances in his scream, the gutted ashen look on his face as he shut her in the coffin, still not listening to a word of her begging, in the throes of loving grief and still unable to see her as anything but a talisman of human cruelty, the tragic victim to his elevated and unhinged protector. She knows she died in Wanda's world, and Pietro's. It felt real, at the time, like she had slid through a terrible mirror, into a glimpse of how it really happened for another Anya. But she has no idea if it was like that, or if the place was just trying anything to hurt her, to make her blame herself and give in. She thinks about Wanda crying, begging her to say, shrieking and threatening and laying down ultimatums in a tone of voice Anya knows best from her own bitter victory speech.]
There was an attack...similar to one when I was a child, only we beat them back. And then a thing like my father was there. He kept saying that they killed me, that I died, like - like I did in other worlds.
[Not like I was supposed to. That's the belief it was trying to play on, but it's just not in her anymore, the spot where it used to be stinging a little like the bed of a lost baby tooth, freshly bloody but soothed by its own emptiness.]