Bury me standing

She hoped that one day she would be able to be as forgiving as Magda. The woman was truly someone to be admired. At this moment – this one moment – Magda was acting like the mother she always wanted to be. Caring for her children no matter what, demonstrating that unconditional love the Maximoffs had shown her, and what she previously would have never let Erik or Magda show her.

Maybe it was time for Wanda to just let herself be capable of somewhat caring for Magda as she did for Marya, if not loving her the way a daughter should. Of course Marya would always have a special place in Wanda’s heart, but maybe Magda deserved a fair chance to be able to win Wanda over.

Wanda looked up to Magda with a smirk. She wanted to laugh, but she honestly wished sometimes that Hank had given her some kind of remote. Things worked out for the best, she figured. Without control over him, they could live like a normal couple, and that was all she wanted. He has his free will, he could do as he pleases. And he chose to kick his wife out of their home.

“I wish I knew the answer to those questions, but I just… don’t know. I believe he can feel and love, but not in a conventional sense. I used to think he just loved me because I was the only woman that showed interest in him, do you think that could be evidence of some kind of feeling? Is attachment a healthy bond in a relationship?” She curled her body into a ball as she sat in her (surprisingly) comfortable chair, never taking her eyes off of her mother in the hopes of finding some kind of judgement or disgust, or just something she could fault her for.

“Is he even worth going back to?”

Rome wasn’t built in a day. Magda knows perfectly well that there’s no instantaneous remedy for her relationship with Wanda. It’s too much too soon, a strained connection that has been left to fester for far too long. Regardless of what remains between them, she’s still happy to be there for her daughter, - to be a friend even if not the mother she’s longed to be since they first crossed paths.

“I think the fact you care enough to ask that question is the biggest sign that you should think this through a little more.” Her words are kind, although perhaps not the most helpful. She doesn’t know what to advise, and that’s the truth. She’s treating Vision just as she would any other of her daughter’s suitors, as a man more than a machine because in truth that’s what he is — but she’d be lying if she said she did have some reservations with how to approach mecha psychology. It wasn’t exactly the usual subject for discussion.

Her gaze is level as she meets Wanda’s watchful stare, her expression passive and far from judgemental as she tries in earnest to conjure up some helpful words of wisdom. What can she say to help? Her own taste in men is questionable at best, so is it even fair to make comment on her child’s romantic entanglements? “Maybe it’s impulsive, maybe he needs time and after that you can go back and talk it through together. Even if you don’t manage to patch things up, isn’t it better to part as friends than on such…bitter terms?”

“Magda!” Max says, reproving and shocked. “That never meant anything to me.”

The moment he says it, he realizes with a sickening jolt that it isn’t true. Oh, not the parts about race and class - he doesn’t think he’s so shallow as that - but he has looked down on humans, has declared himself their superior.

And every time he did, he thought of her.

“Magda,” he says again, levelly this time. “You deserve better than me. You always have.”

So, he thinks, does Adelaide. So does Charles. So does Rogue. It’s not that he believes he is somehow inferior; he knows what he has survived, what he is capable of, what he must yet do. But he is not suited to this task. He is not suited to being a husband. His mind is full of barbed wire and fire, and even if he and Magda could find their way through the shadows of the past, she would cut herself on him. She deserves better than that.

“You say one thing, but your actions say another.” She hates herself and he isn’t helping. His entire life’s mission has been a one man crusade to prove he’s better than everyone else, to prove that the next stage of evolution has occurred and that anyone that isn’t like him is somehow lesser. Maybe he doesn’t intend for it to be that way, but that doesn’t change the fact Magda is forever having to hold herself to an ideal that is unobtainable.

She doesn’t know how to speak to him. Doesn’t know how to explain that there are days where she doesn’t want to wake up anymore, where she feels inadequate and surpassed by her children, where she feels like a deadweight tied around all their feet simply by existing. Humanity is her curse and it’s the one thing she’s longed for since the camps had stripped it from her. She wanted to be seen as human, to stop being treated as something beneath that, yet even now she’s still not good enough. She’s still not what Erik wants or what he needs.

Her eyes are helpless when she looks at him, when she is so angry and wounded at the same time. “I never wanted better.” It’s a quiet admission, seeped in sadness but also a resilience. “You and I, we were supposed to be the same. Underdogs cut from different cloth, but somehow we survived together. You were my family, we were equal. And now? I don’t even know what we are or what you want anymore. All I see are lines in the sand.”

Would’ve killed to have a consistent food source when we were on the run, but I got really good at cooking rabbit. When my fingers were too small to shoot a gun properly, it was my job to catch the things and pick whatever wild food we could find. So stews are a thing I know how to cook, though the slew of foods I can use now probably make it taste better than what I was feeding my group. You’ll have to show me how to make it, then. I’d ask for a recipe, but I know food isn’t just about what you put in it, but also what you do with it. I mean, to be fair, you could always just threaten to strangle him while lying. If that’s how you normally speak, then he won’t catch it. He’s a brilliant man, but not the most observant. 

Consistent isn’t always a good thing. I’ve done things in my lifetime for food that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. If food is scarce at least you learn to tough it out, to make your meals last, to savour them when they do arrive. You can keep your dignity, keep your pride. It’s an odd mentality, but I think if anyone would understand it’s you. I could never stomach rabbit myself, I’m too fond of lop ears to imagine eating them. I think Max would though, his speciality was usually mystery bird - and sometimes I just learnt not to question it. I’d be more than happy to teach you - it’d be nice to have someone that isn’t a culinary arsonist in the house. Strangling him though? I’ll bear that in mind. I’m with you on the lack of observance. I don’t even think he notices the things I throw at him until they hit him in the face.

“It is… comfort to think this way.” Wanda shrugs, crossing her arms and stealing another glance at Magda out of the corner of her eye. Wanda finds herself wishing so badly that she had a connection to this woman. That she had found some part of her family out there in the world. Even if it meant a few things in her life would be different. It would just mean that she wasn’t so alone in the world, as she’d said before. 

“But it might be for the better… And I always thought if I had family we would know each others faces.” Wanda turns to Magda again, gesturing with with her hands to her own face. She makes sweeping gestures, exaggerated movements down her cheeks. “That they would look at me and we would know. Just like that.”

It was a silly thought but it gave her hope, and she realizes now that this is the most animated she has found herself in a while. It makes her excited and she feels compelled to talk to Magda more. Even if they aren’t family, Wanda feels a kinship with the woman. Remembering the purse at her side, and the money she was allotted inside, Wanda decides to make an offer.  “Can I buy you dinner?”

She thinks she does know and perhaps that’s part of the problem. She recognises the softness of her features, the jawline of her own mother and Max’s smile. Or at least she thinks she does. It’s hard to tell anymore, she’s been seeing bits of her children in strangers for years — from children laughing that she could’ve sworn were Anya through to eyes so piercing, she may as well have been staring into her husband’s gaze. It’s all a trick, she tells herself, all a simple coping mechanism that can only be false. She doesn’t want to run the risk of disappointing anyone else; is afraid truthfully of the mere possibility that this could be here flesh and blood.

It’s why she denies it. It’s why she claims no connection when she can feel it. It’s in her bones and aching in her chest, her stomach knotting as a sheer force of will serves to remind her that she can’t think this way. It wouldn’t be fair. Not after so long, to have wandered into someone’s life and expected it to be okay. Wanda acts as if she’d like to meet family, to find that she still has some after so much loss — but would the reality really be the same? Would she still be so tolerant if she knew half of what had transpired?

The thoughts make Magda squirm, shuffling on the spot in the mausoleum of a memorial. The prospect of food is one she can’t ignore, but it seems so…odd to expect hospitality from a stranger. Part of her wants to ask to go halves, but that insults the gesture and she doesn’t want to offend her new found friend. “Tak. That would be…lovely — but only if you’re sure you can afford to.”

But consider: Has that ever worked on me, darling?

True. But that’s what chloroform’s for! Or horse tranquillisers. Go to sleep. 

Knowing there was time to sit and talk with the local population was a rare leisure they were allowed to experience. Most of the time it was having to avoid them but at this point in the war it wasn’t so heavily enforced. It made everything for once seem normal, that there was a human aspect to what they were doing. Of course that would change when told to go back on the lines but the men enjoyed these rare and few breaks that gave them a small sense of normalcy. 

It was nice to relax some and sit down on the ground without having to worry about if the Germans were going to come over to their foxhole. He tilted his head as she spoke, furrowing his brow since he believed it showed he was listening to what she was saying and somewhat suggesting. “Shoot ‘em nicely? If that was a possible thing I don’t think that would work. They surrender if they want, we don’t shoot ‘em then usually. Some guys break and kill ‘em.” He shrugged at that, there was nothing they could do about it  and war was hell after all. “Well sometimes they get shot there and surrender too so we don’t kill ‘em when they’re surrenderin’ like I said before. But the majority? Nah, those Krauts are too proud to surrender.”

She never thought she’d see the day that she was willing to sit down with a soldier and talk to him. Then again, she supposes in this case, it’s not exactly someone she would actively consider to be one. Sure, he’s armed and dangerous and trained to kill - but he’s a friend, not the enemy and that tends to add a lot of conflict to how she views the world and the people in it. Maybe Magda isn’t trusting of the Americans, to her they all pose some degree of risk, but when they talk to her as if she’s an equal, as a person in her own right, it’s enough to endear her enough to keep wanting to know them.

“Oh.” She sounds out in response, processing the information given and trying to convey her own sentiment into words. She can understand of course, she’s not completely stupid when it comes to warfare, but she does still harbour a far more pacifist agenda than any fight would cater to. Shooting them seems barbaric, fighting in general is like a childish descent into something animalistic, but at the same time she knows what it means to survive. To have to make choices and sacrifices that will haunt you for the rest of your life. “You’re stubborn too though.” She almost smiles, picking at the dirt beside her before her chin tilts upwards and lets her eyes settle on his face once again. “If nobody surrenders, won’t we always be at war?”

❛ —I would almost pay to see that, actually.

And alright, they’re not so bad. They’re a little cute, a pile of fur and pathetic mewls. One of them seems to have developed a liking for Jack’s trousers and attempts to claw its way up his leg, sharp claws digging into his skin. He hisses, but the kitten doesn’t seem too deterred by that.

❛ —Why pay when it can happen to you for free? Go forth my tiny minions. Kill, kill! There’s a great deal of theatricality in the way she urges those kittens to run at Jack, as if tiny paws and dinky noses will somehow manage to devour him whole. They’re bundles of fluff, nothing more, although Magda does admittedly feel a pang of guilt amidst her humour as she watches surprisingly sharp claws scrape through fabric toward skin as one adventurous feline attempts to climb her companion.

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