CHAPTER 4: THE MIND STONE'S TOUCH - PART 2
The medical bay smelled of disinfectant and ozone, sharp scents that cut through Wanda's mounting terror as she watched her brother convulse on the monitoring table. Electrodes tracked his vital signs while Dr. List muttered over readouts that meant nothing to her, but Pietro's face told a story she could read all too well—pain, confusion, and something else she couldn't name.
"Is he dying?" The words tumbled from her lips before she could stop them.
"On the contrary," List replied without looking up from his instruments. "Subject Twelve's enhancement was the most successful we've recorded. His cellular integration is perfect, neural coherence at unprecedented levels. He's simply processing the transformation."
But Wanda could feel wrongness radiating from her twin's unconscious form. Their bond, dormant for so long, flickered with unfamiliar energies. Something had changed in Pietro during his enhancement—something that went far beyond simple superhuman speed.
"He feels... different. Like part of him is somewhere else now."
Dr. List finally turned to face her, his expression clinical and eager. "Your turn, Subject Thirteen."
Terror closed around Wanda's throat like a fist. She'd volunteered for this, driven by the same hunger for revenge that had motivated Pietro. But seeing her brother reduced to a twitching form on a medical table made the reality of enhancement impossible to ignore. In a few minutes, she might be lying beside him, forever changed or simply dead.
"The chamber is ready," List continued, gesturing toward the sealed door that had swallowed Pietro thirty minutes ago. "Your biological markers indicate exceptional compatibility with the artifact. Much higher than your brother's initial readings."
"Because Pietro was hiding something from them. I could sense it during his tests—layers of deception I couldn't penetrate."
But there was no time to puzzle out her brother's secrets. Two Hydra technicians flanked her, not quite restraining her but making it clear that retreat wasn't an option. Wanda walked toward the chamber on unsteady legs, each step bringing her closer to a transformation she couldn't fully comprehend.
The enhancement chamber opened before her like the mouth of some technological beast. The Mind Stone blazed in its housing at the room's center, but the golden light seemed different now—hungrier somehow, as if Pietro's successful enhancement had awakened something in the artifact's ancient consciousness.
"Initiating exposure sequence for Subject Thirteen," List announced through the intercom. "Beginning neural baseline recording."
Wanda stepped into the chamber and felt the Stone's power immediately. Unlike the violent rejection Pietro had experienced, the Mind Stone's presence felt... welcoming. It reached for her with invisible tendrils of energy, probing the edges of her consciousness with gentle curiosity.
"It recognizes me. Like it's been waiting for me specifically."
The containment field began to lower, bringing the scepter closer to her position. Golden light intensified, but instead of the harsh glare that had accompanied Pietro's enhancement, Wanda found herself bathed in warmth that seemed to emanate from within her own cells.
"Remarkable," List murmured, his voice carrying notes of genuine surprise. "Subject Thirteen's bioelectric field is resonating with the artifact in perfect harmony. Beginning low-level exposure."
The Mind Stone's beam struck Wanda in the chest, and instead of pain, she felt... awakening.
Power flooded through her nervous system like liquid fire, but rather than burning, it felt like coming home. The Mind Stone wasn't trying to impose foreign abilities on her unwilling biology—it was unlocking something that had always been there, waiting beneath the surface. The genetic gift she'd inherited from parents who had never known they carried the potential for magic.
Red energy exploded outward from her body, crackling through the air in patterns that followed no earthly physics. But this wasn't destruction—it was creation, the fundamental force that allowed reality to reshape itself according to will and desire. Chaos magic, pure and unlimited, flowing through her consciousness like a river of liquid possibility.
"I can feel everything. Every atom in the room, every quantum possibility, every thread that connects this moment to infinite others."
But with the power came visions that threatened to drown her sanity. The chaos magic didn't just grant her the ability to alter reality—it showed her all the realities that existed, all the choices that led to different outcomes, all the lives she might have lived in worlds where different decisions had been made.
She saw herself as a child in Sokovia, but in some timelines, her parents never died. In others, she and Pietro were separated at birth. In still others, they never gained powers at all, living normal human lives until age claimed them.
And then she saw Pietro.
In thousands of branching timelines, she watched her brother die. Sometimes in Sokovia, torn apart by Ultron's drones. Sometimes during the enhancement process, his body unable to withstand the Mind Stone's power. Sometimes in places and circumstances that made no sense—fighting alongside heroes she didn't recognize, facing threats that seemed to come from fantasy rather than reality.
But in one terrible vision, she saw Pietro lying in rubble, his silver hair stained with blood, his body riddled with bullet holes. He was smiling as he died, and his final words echoed across dimensions with heartbreaking clarity:
"You didn't see that coming?"
The image was so vivid, so real, that Wanda screamed. The sound tore from her throat with enough force to shatter the chamber's reinforced windows, but the chaos magic amplified it into something far more devastating. Reality itself rippled around her anguish, and the shockwave that erupted from her transformed voice carried impossible power.
The wave of red energy raced through the facility's walls and floors, seeking its target with the unerring precision of quantum entanglement. It found Pietro thirty meters away, unconscious on his medical table, and struck his enhanced nervous system like a lightning bolt made of pure emotion.
Pietro's consciousness snapped back to awareness as Wanda's scream reached him through dimensions he couldn't name. The sound carried more than mere sound waves—it was threaded with chaos magic, raw and uncontrolled, seeking connection with the only anchor point in her transformed reality.
Their twin bond, dormant since childhood, exploded into full activation.
For three seconds that lasted subjective hours, Pietro and Wanda became one consciousness distributed across two bodies. He felt her terror and wonder as chaos magic rewrote the fundamental laws around her. She experienced his impossible speed, the sensation of existing partially outside normal time, and the dark hunger of void energy that had settled into his soul like a parasite.
But most devastating of all, they shared memories.
Pietro felt Wanda's visions of infinite timelines, saw himself dying in a thousand different ways across countless realities. The knowledge that his canonical death was not just possible but probable sent waves of existential terror through his enhanced nervous system.
Wanda, meanwhile, glimpsed fragments of Pietro's impossible knowledge—memories that belonged to someone who had never been born in their world, someone who had watched their lives unfold as entertainment, someone who carried knowledge of events that hadn't happened yet but might, given the right circumstances.
She saw flashes of a purple titan collecting golden stones. Glimpsed heroes in costumes she didn't recognize fighting battles that seemed to span entire galaxies. Experienced the sensation of watching herself, Pietro, and people they'd never met living out adventures that felt simultaneously fictional and utterly real.
"How does he know these things? These aren't his memories, but they're not fantasies either. They're... real? But from where?"
The connection overwhelmed both twins simultaneously. Pietro's enhanced perception, designed to process superhuman speeds, couldn't handle the influx of chaos magic and prophetic visions. Wanda's awakening powers, suddenly forced to interface with void energy and dimensional displacement, short-circuited under the strain.
Their shared consciousness fragmented, snapping back to their individual bodies like a rubber band stretched beyond its breaking point. Both twins collapsed as the feedback from their brief mental fusion sent them into protective unconsciousness.
Dr. List rushed between their monitoring stations, his instruments registering energy readings that defied every scientific principle he understood. Both subjects were alive, their vital signs actually stronger than baseline human norms. But the electromagnetic signatures they were generating suggested they had become something entirely unprecedented.
"Unprecedented success," he dictated to his recording device, trying to keep the excitement from his voice. "Both subjects have survived enhancement with full power integration. But the energy interaction between them..." He paused, reviewing readings that suggested the twins were somehow sharing a quantum connection. "This requires further study. They appear to be... linked at the cellular level."
What List couldn't detect—what no human instrument could measure—was the deeper truth of what had just occurred. Pietro and Wanda Maximoff were no longer simply enhanced humans. They had become something new, something that existed partially outside normal reality.
Pietro carried void energy in his soul, power drawn from collapsed dimensions and hungry for connection to its point of origin. Wanda wielded chaos magic that could rewrite the fundamental laws of physics, but her control was influenced by emotional bonds that transcended space and time.
And between them, activated by trauma and powered by cosmic forces, stretched a connection that would allow them to share abilities, memories, and even consciousness itself.
As both twins drifted in healing unconsciousness, neither fully understood what they had become. But the universe itself took notice, registering their transformation in ways that would echo across space and time.
Somewhere in the cosmic depths, entities that existed beyond normal reality felt the ripples of their awakening. The Mind Stone's gift had been given. The void's claim had been established. And the twin bond that connected them had become something that could bridge the gap between dimensions.
The Maximoff twins were no longer simply human.
They were something altogether more dangerous.
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