a reminder that i’m still working on my scarlet witch!steve fic
Steve's powers don’t show themselves in any physical way until the night Nancy dumps him. But he’s felt them for some time before then.
He felt them first when Nancy fell in love with Jonathan. Love feels soft and warm, like a kitten curling on your chest, purring contentedly away. It feels so fragile when it first begins, hesitant like maybe it shouldn’t exist, shouldn’t be there. But then it swells, it consumes you like a fire, and it burns in Steve’s veins if he focuses on it, until it settles into the soft, warm peaceful thing love should be.
But he felt Nancy fall out of love with him too. And that feels like death. He feels the love die and it was cold. It felt like drowning in icy waters - there’s the stage where he desperately fought to swim back to the surface and save it, the even more frantic stage where he tried to hold his breath, just to keep the love alive, and then there was the dreadful acceptance that there was nothing more he could do. One day Steve walked up to Nancy in the school hallway and felt an overwhelming cold grasp his heart. It was heavy and empty and so terrible that he immediately turned from her and rushed to the bathroom, where he spent several minutes throwing up and crying.
He felt numb for a while after that. Until that night at the party when Nancy finally told him she didn’t love him. That they were bullshit. The moment she said it he felt the rumblings of emotion, like a volcano preparing for the inevitable.
After telling Jonathan to get Nancy home safe, Steve drives two towns away to an empty field he’s been coming to for years now. It’s his grieving place, where he goes when he needs to feel his own sadness and hurt. Steve walks into the middle of the field, and he screams.
He feels like he blacked out after that, but he doesn’t.
It’s like some other part of him takes over, a part that doesn’t question the green energy emitting from his hands.
Steve screams and he cries, sad and angry and hurt. He rips several trees apart and conjures up a cloud of thunder that several police departments and weather stations get a call about later because the clouds are black and the lightning that jabs through it is a haunting shade of green. It’s not like Steve hasn’t had moments like this before, moments where he finally lets go of something he’s been holding onto and maybe overreacting in the process, but this is a whole other level that some part of him is terrified. There’s another part of Steve that feels relived, though. Free, even, like that part of him has been waiting for this moment, to unleash this part of himself.
When it’s over, Steve’s exhausted. He falls to his knees in the epicenter of his own chaos, looks down at the ground, and notices in the bottom of his vision that there’s blood. His nose is bleeding. Shaking fingers come up to feel the crimson staining his face, and he stares at what transfers onto his hands for a long time before deciding he’s not emotionally ready to handle the reality of what this means.
He’s in no condition to drive. He’s drained, drunk, and his vision is blurry. But that doesn’t stop him from standing, steadying himself, and looking around himself for another moment.
He really did make a mess. But he doesn’t know how to get rid of it.
So he doesn’t. He stumbles back to the car and simply drives home.
