Agatha All Along

This is the story of an old, old prophecy. And the day Wanda Maximoff finally found out that she was the person it had been written about all along.

Long, long ago — long before Wanda was born, long before her mother and father were born, long before even Captain America was born — the witches of the world were writing in their oldest, dustiest books. The witches were a careful, watchful sort of people. They studied the stars. They studied the storms. They studied the strange shapes that magic makes when it appears on Earth.

And one day, deep in their oldest books, the witches began to write about someone who had not yet arrived. They didn't know her name. They didn't know where she would be born. But they knew, somehow, that she was coming. They called her the Scarlet Witch.

The witches wrote down everything they could guess about her. They wrote that she would not study magic the way other witches did. They wrote that she would not borrow her power from other dimensions, the way the sorcerers of Kamar-Taj do. They wrote that her magic would simply GROW inside her, like a second heart, the way an apple tree grows apples. The witches were a little bit frightened of her. They wrote her name in red ink. They underlined it three whole times.

Now, on the other side of the world, in a small American town in Massachusetts called Salem, there lived a witch named Agatha Harkness. Agatha was three hundred and forty years old. She had been alive way back when the very first American colonies were just little wooden villages. She had been alive during the famous Salem witch trials, when hundreds of years ago people accused her of being a witch.

Agatha had survived those trials in a very dark way. She had stolen the magic of the other witches who tried to punish her. She drank in their power like a thirsty plant drinks rain. From that day on, Agatha kept her own magic very hidden. She lived in pleasant houses. She wore pearls. She baked her famous snickerdoodle cookies, which smelled like cinnamon and brown sugar. She always — ALWAYS — kept one eye on the news.

For three hundred and forty years, Agatha waited. She waited to see if anyone else with truly great magic would ever appear on Earth.

Then, one autumn afternoon, Agatha felt it. A great red glow rippled across the entire East Coast of the United States. It came from a sleepy little town in New Jersey called Westview. Agatha closed her eyes, smelled the air, and smiled.

"There you are," she whispered.

She packed her bags that very night. She drove to Westview. She rented the small white house right next door to the brand-new Maximoff family. She wore her pearls. She baked her snickerdoodles. She called herself "Agnes." And she smiled and smiled and smiled.

For many weeks, Agatha pretended to be just a friendly neighbor. She borrowed cups of sugar. She waved over the fence. She tickled the chins of Billy and Tommy, the impossible little twin boys Wanda had made out of love. The whole time, in secret, she was measuring. She was listening to Wanda's heartbeat. She was checking how much of Wanda's red magic was wild and how much was tame. She was waiting for exactly the right moment.

That moment came when Wanda was at her most tired, when her grief was tangling her up in her own story, when she could not quite tell what was real anymore. Agatha pulled back the curtain.

Her cozy little basement, where she had pretended to keep her sewing machine, suddenly revealed itself as a candlelit witch's cellar. Runes glowed all over the walls. Old books floated in the air. Agatha's eyes flashed bright purple. And she sang the song she had been practicing in her head for three hundred years.

"It was Agatha all along!"

The whole house shook. Wanda gasped. The hex bubble around Westview rippled.

Then Agatha did something cruel. She showed Wanda the old prophecy. She opened an ancient book and pointed at the name written in red ink and underlined three times.

"Look, Wanda," she said. "The witches were afraid of you. They begged the universe to never let you be born. You weren't supposed to exist."

For one long, long moment, Wanda Maximoff almost believed her.

She thought about Pietro. She thought about Vision. She thought about everything her magic had cost. She thought, maybe — maybe the witches were right. Maybe a person with this much power should not exist. Maybe she should give her chaos magic to Agatha, who at least seemed to know what she was doing. Maybe Wanda should become small and quiet and ordinary, and let three hundred and forty years of careful witchcraft take over.

But then Wanda took a deep, shaky breath.

She had been afraid of herself for too many years. She had been afraid in Sokovia, after Pietro died. She had been afraid in Wakanda, after destroying the Mind Stone. She had been afraid in Westview, when she realized what her grief had built. She was tired of being afraid of herself.

And she had decided — somewhere deep down — that SHE would be the one to choose what to do with her own magic. Not a HYDRA scientist. Not the governments of the world. Not the writers of an ancient witches' prophecy. Not even a three-hundred-and-forty-year-old witch with purple lightning. Just Wanda.

She lifted her hand.

Red light poured out of her palm. She traced Agatha's own runes — the magic-blocking runes Agatha had drawn on the basement walls — high across the inside of the entire Hex bubble. Whoever was trapped inside the bubble could not use their magic, except for Wanda herself. The runes had been Agatha's own trap. Wanda turned the trap around.

Agatha froze in the air. Her purple lightning fizzled out into nothing. Her smile vanished.

Wanda lifted slowly off the ground. Her hair grew darker and longer. Her plain coat became a flowing red cloak. A scarlet headpiece formed around her brow like a small, beautiful crown. The yellow light of an ordinary afternoon dimmed around her, until only she was glowing.

And in that quiet, magical moment, the Scarlet Witch — the person the witches had warned about for hundreds of years, the person who was not supposed to exist — opened her eyes for the very first time.

And she chose, very quietly, to be good.

The witches in their old books had been wrong about one thing. They had assumed that anyone with the power of the Scarlet Witch would use it badly. But they had not known about a girl named Wanda Maximoff, who had grown up in a Sokovian apartment with a brother who made her laugh, who had loved a kind man with a plum-colored face, who had built a sitcom family out of her own grief and then chosen to let it go.

The Scarlet Witch was here. And she was going to be a hero.