Gift For lupus_dragon: Backwards and in High Heels
Title: Backwards and in High Heels
Gift For: lupus_dragon
Rating: G to PG
Pairings/Characters: Carol, Wanda, assorted other Avengers in the background.
Labels/Warnings: All fluff, no plot.
A/N: Set at an indeterminate point in late Volume 3, post when the chaos entity possesses Wanda but pre-Red Zone.
Prompt: Avengers; fluff; femslash Carol/Wanda: Carol hates magic, even her teammate's magic. However, even she has to admit that magic can come in handy sometimes. Real witches, magic spells, and Carol admitting her feelings for Wanda.
Summary: Carol and Wanda dance at the Avengers Halloween party. There, um, aren’t actually any witches or spells, really, but there is admitting of feelings.
Personally, Carol felt that a costume party was slightly redundant, given that most of the Avengers spent a good forty to sixty percent of their time in costumes anyway, but Jan had been insistent on it. Any excuse for her to design clothing and dress half the team up like living dolls was not to be missed.
Carol had already seen Jan, Wanda, and Jen's costumes -- two flappers and a Garbo-esque silent screen vamp -- earlier that week, and it was obvious that all three had come from Jan's drawing board. Jan had offered Carol a one-of-a-kind reproduction 1920s dress as well, but with one thing and another -- getting the proofs for her second book sent back to the publishers, three attacks on downtown Manhattan and yet another break out from Rikers Island by the Masters of Evil -- she had never managed to make a single fitting.
She'd put her own costume together, instead, most of it at the last minute. The gangster-style fedora had come from a costume shop, and didn't quite fit, sitting awkwardly on her hair, and the thrift-store black suit was more 1930s than 1920s, but at least she had company in the wrong decade. Vision, currently talking awkwardly with Simon on the far side of the room while both of them avoided Wanda, was gleefully wearing a Sam Spade-style trench coat and fedora.
All of the Avengers' parties had themes, and Halloween was no exception. Tonight's theme was the Roaring Twenties, complete with jazz music and Prohibition.
Well, there would be jazz music, if she and Wanda could ever get the antique Victrola to work.
"I think something's wrong with the tonearm," Carol said, for the second time. "That's why it keeps skipping. That, or these are the wrong kind of records." She glared at the ornate wooden cabinet that concealed the thing's massive amplifying horn, and reminded herself once more that the party's total lack of alcohol was because of Tony's issues, and not because of her.
They had taken her back. They had even cleared her of wrong-doing during the court martial after Kang's attack. They trusted her. Any worries that Cap, Tony, or Wanda were still silently judging her and watching every glass she drank were all in her paranoid imagination.
Wanda frowned at the ancient turntable, rubbing one finger along the tonearm. "They're original 78rpm shellac records from the forties. Cap borrowed them from Vision. They ought to work." Her dark-red, heavily applied lipstick made the frown look more seductively pouty than annoyed; Wanda rarely wore heavy make-up, but the dark eye-liner and boldly colored cupids-bow lips that went with her flapper costume suited her. Wanda's bone structure was strong enough that she looked dramatic, rather than babydoll cute the way that Jan did.
Carol dragged her eyes away from Wanda's lips and back to the record player. "Maybe we should just get Tony to look at it."
"No." Wanda shook her head. "He'll take the entire thing apart, spend half an hour trying to figure out how to make it play more loudly or at a higher fidelity or something, and we'll never get to actually dance."
They were never going to get to dance, anyway, at this point. Half the Avengers were already milling aimlessly around the room, and Jan was giving Carol and Wanda pointed looks. "Let's just go get a CD player."
Wanda bent to peer at the stylus, the fringe on her dress swaying as she moved. "It wouldn't be the same. Old record players have a completely different sound." A pause, then, "I think this is bent."
Carol shrugged. "Don't look at me. I was trained to fly F-15s, not figure out stone age stuff like this."
Wanda raised her eyebrows. "You use a manual typewriter."
"I like the sound the keys make." It was silly, but the loud clacks every time she hit a key made her feel like a real writer. Reporters in old movies always used typewriters, and when she'd first started working for the Bugle, before she'd had enough of Jameson's yelling and quit, Carol had been almost disappointed to walk into the newsroom and see boxy grey desktops, laser printers, and a no smoking sign rather than typewriters and a haze of cigar smoke.
At least, she was pretty sure she'd been disappointed. The memory was distant, like all her memories pre-coma were.
"We had an old record player when Pietro and I were growing up," Wanda said thoughtfully. "More modern than this one, obviously, but still... sometimes I could get it to stop skipping if I just..."
She raised one hand and made a twisting gesture with it, murmuring something under her breath in Transian. Pink and red sparks danced around her fingers, and the Victrola's stylus and tonearm glowed for a moment.
Carol looked away, her stomach twisting, and tried to force the memory of Wanda hanging in midair over her bed, half-naked and writhing in either pain or ecstasy, out of her mind. She'd seen magic used to manipulate people, to possess them, too often. Wanda's possession by Chthon, and then by the manifestation of chaos. What the Shadow King had done to Jessica. Morgan Le Fay's mass delusion, which had been so terrifyingly, convincingly real that she'd had nightmares about being trapped in it for a week afterwards.
Magic warped people's perceptions, got inside their heads and fucked with them on every conceivable level. Remembering Wanda's body glazed with sweat and glowing with power shouldn't turn her on. Wanda had been possessed. Mind-raped. Only a sick, cruel person would have found it hot.
"Do you really have to do that?" Carol asked. "Can't you just whammy it with a hex sphere?"
"Only if I wanted it to explode." Wanda lifted the tonearm and set the stylus carefully against the record. Slightly tinny jazz music began playing, smooth and completely free from skipping. "Hex spheres aren't controlled enough for this kind of thing. The spell fine-tunes it; it makes the chaos energy produce the outcome I want, rather than just random chance. Uncontrolled chaos energy is usually destructive."
Carol made a face. Destructive was putting it mildly. "Tony could have-" she started.
"But this way he doesn't need to."
Fifteen minutes later, when Tony still hadn't shown up, Carol was forced to admit, if only to herself, that enchanting the record player to play properly was much better than standing around for a quarter of an hour with no music.
She had danced with Vision twice, despite the uncomfortable twinge of guilt she felt over dancing with Wanda's ex-husband while Wanda was right there in the room, and once with Steve, to a swing number she knew post-dated the Roaring Twenties by at least a decade.
Dancing with Steve was one of the few things that made Carol feel small and delicate. Several of the men she could remember dating had been no taller than she was, especially when she was wearing heels. She had appreciated that at times, after Marcus had kidnapped her, but Steve was different. He might have been one of the deadliest fighters she knew, and probably capable of taking Carol out despite her super-strength, but he was also genuinely nice and thoroughly non-threatening. Captain America would never take advantage of anybody. Judge them, yes, and kick them off the Avengers for no real reason other than Tony's raging paranoia, but not take advantage of them.
Captain America was also wearing a ridiculous zoot suit that, combined with his massively broad shoulders, made him look like a thug from a James Cagney movie. Unlike most of the other Avengers, he wore it casually, as if it were just another set of evening clothes rather than a slightly silly-looking costume.
"I think he helped Jan pick the costume theme," Wanda was saying, nodding at the dance floor, where Steve and Jan were now dancing extremely athletically to something fast-paced with a lot of saxophone in it. "And I wouldn't be surprised if they chose it just so that the two of them would have an excuse to dance like that."
Steve lifted Jan up onto his shoulders, the short skirt of her dress riding up to flash the tops of her thigh-high -- and period appropriate -- stockings. Carol allowed herself one moment to appreciate the brief glimpse of garter straps and black lace, and then returned her gaze to Wanda. Checking out your straight female teammates was just asking for trouble, even when they weren't already taken. "Doesn't Hank get jealous?"
"I suspect that's part of the point." Wanda said dryly. Then she smiled, and nodded at the dance floor. "Since the only man who isn't avoiding me is currently occupied, would you like to dance?"
Oh, not fair. "Who would lead?" Carol asked, managing to keep her voice light and casual despite the sudden lurch in her stomach at the thought of Wanda in her arms, of putting her hands on Wanda's shoulders, hips, waist and trying to act as if it meant nothing to her.
Lots of women were attractive. Wanda was attractive, brave, witty, and a friend, and that was an unfair combination. The longer Carol worked with her, the harder it was to ignore, and the fact that Wanda had been one of the few superheroes to offer her unwaving support after Marcus had... after Marcus, didn't help.
Watching something else take over her body had been sickeningly, stomach-twistingly wrong. If was an awful thing to watch happen to anyone, but this time... She couldn't remember ever being that frightened for someone else, not even when Tony had nearly died back on the West Coast. Hearing Wanda speak with someone else's voice had filled her with the same cold dread that she'd felt when she'd seen Tony fall out of the sky like a rock, only worse. Tony had still been encased in armor then, had still looked invulnerable, even though she'd known perfectly well that that was an illusion.
Wanda had been half naked, painfully fragile-looking in her pink nightgown, and after that first moment of stunned admiration at the sight of her bare limbs and erotically arched back had come a rush of worry and guilt.
"We can toss a coin," Wanda suggested, and arguing would only have drawn attention to the fact that the idea of dancing with her made Carol uncomfortable.
In the future, Carol decided some moments later, as Wanda swept her backwards into a dip that was made awkward by the fact that Carol was several inches taller than Wanda and outweighed her by about fifteen pounds, she would know better than to try a coin toss against someone who could alter probability.
"Don't think I don't know you cheated." Carol straightened up and stepped toward Wanda, following Wanda's step backwards. This close, she could smell the coconut scent of Wanda's shampoo, and see the smudges in her eye make-up. Her lipstick, in contrast, was still perfect, red and gleaming, and for a moment, Carol felt a reckless urge to mess it up, to smear the artfully stylized bow shape back into something more natural.
Wanda shook her head, her hair swaying, and stretched her arm out to let Carol spin away from her. "I'm actually very bad at slight of hand," she said, which wasn't exactly a denial.
"You're a real live witch." Carol spun away until they were an arm's length apart, still holding hands, then twirled back towards Wanda. "You don't need card tricks." The final turn put her flush against Wanda's front, both of them facing forward.
There was a short, awkward moment as Carol realized that she didn't actually know how to smoothly get from this position back to a proper dancing position -- every time she had done something this fancy before, it had been with a more experienced dancer who had guided her through it.
Wanda seemed to have no more idea what the next step ought to be than Carol did -- they both froze, awkwardly pressed against one another, Carol's arms crossed in front of her and Wanda holding both her hands, and then Wanda released her and took a step back.
Carol turned to face her, trying to move in time with the music and look as if the entire thing had been intentional.
"Sorry," Wanda apologized, taking Carol's hands again and pulling both of them into a much less adventurous swing step. It didn't quite match the music, which was probably written for the jitterbug or the Charleston or some other old time-y dance step Carol had never learned, but nobody in the room other than Steve had ever actually danced those, so it wasn't like it mattered.
"Card tricks are easy," Wanda added, after a few moments during which they had failed to painfully botch any other dance moves. "Cards are all a matter of chance and probability. It's why we don't have an Avengers' poker night anymore."
Wanda was not the sort of person who used her powers for frivolous things, let alone for winning her teammates' money. "I can't believe you'd cheat at that."
Wanda shook her head, a look of amused exasperation on her face. "I didn't. Tony does. He counts cards. He claims that it's subconscious and he can't stop."
Carol snorted. "He would." The music rose to a crescendo, and she lifted their arms and let Wanda twirl in a circle, the long fringe on her dress flying out around her and hitting Carol in the shins.
Wanda laughed, coming to a stop as the song ended. "I feel like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in these outfits."
"Fred Astair always led." Carol pointed out, reaching up to adjust her fedora. It was cheap felt, stiff and not made to fit over long hair, and it kept sliding down over her eyes.
"At least you don't have to do it in heels."
Wanda was staring up at her, still standing slightly closer than she needed to. Carol could almost feel her despite the inches between them, the hair on her arms rising. "Dancing is actually easier in heels," she said, trying to keep her voice as casual and friendly as Wanda's was. "That's the way I learned to do it." Most of the men she'd danced with were inches shorter than her when she wore heels, but a man who couldn't handle the fact that his date was taller than him wasn't worth a second date anyway. Women tended to have fewer hang-ups about that, thankfully. "Anyway, they're from the wrong decade."
"Who would you rather I compare you to?" Wanda asked.
Carol shrugged, racking her brain to think of an actress from the twenties or thirties other than the one whose cousin had founded the de Havilland Aircraft Company. "Marlene Dietrich?
Wanda smiled, looking up at Carol through eyelashes spiky with mascara. "She's the wrong decade, too, but she did look very good in a tuxedo." She let her eyes drop, then slowly looked Carol up and down, with an appreciative look that implied that she thought Marlene wasn't the only one who looked good in men's clothes.
At least, if Carol had given that look to another woman, that's what it would have meant. Was Wanda actually flirting with her?
No, she told herself. She was trying to turn friendly banter into something it wasn't because she wanted Wanda to flirt with her, wanted to excuse herself from the guilt and embarrassment of spending the past few weeks lusting over Wanda by telling herself her interest was returned.
"You should have seen me in uniform," she said. "I looked like a very sexy airline stewardess."
"I'm sure you-" Wanda started to reply, then cut herself off as another song began to play, this one a waltz heavily laced with the crackles and popping sounds of a very old recording. "Would you like to keep dancing?" she asked. Her tone had changed from playful to serious, and Carol, looking into her eyes, had the unnerving sense that Wanda had seen directly through all of her attempts at acting casual. She'd always been able to do that, no matter how hard Carol had tried to hide things -- her drinking, her worries about her powers, her fears of being expelled from the team after Kang's invasion; Wanda had been able to see through the front she had put up each time.
"People will assume things," Carol said, nodding to where Simon and Vision stood by the Victrola, watching the dance floor. Dancing a fast, energetic dance with another woman might just be for fun, especially if there weren't enough male dance partners to go around, but a slow dance was different. Dance with another woman like you meant it, and people started to ask questions, to suspect things. She'd always avoided it when she had still been in the air force, once she'd figured out just how far she could push things before her bisexuality drew the wrong person's attention.
Wanda shook her head, smiling. "When do they not?"
She didn't understand, Carol knew. If she did, she wouldn't dance with Carol and mock flirt with her so casually. "I like women as well as men," she said, feeling her face heat slightly at the effort it still took to actually say those words aloud. "You shouldn't flirt with me if you don't really mean it. I don't try that hard to keep it a secret anymore, so everyone will think you're-"
Wanda laid a hand on Carol's arm, her red-painted fingernails bright against the black of Carol's suit jacket. "When I was a girl, my family would have been completely disgraced if anyone had seen me dancing with another woman like this. Now all I have left is Pietro, and he hates anyone I date on principle anyway. He can't possibly throw a bigger temper-tantrum over another woman than he did over Vision."
Carol blinked at her. Around them, half their teammates were already dancing; Hank with Jan, awkwardly, Clint with Jen, and Scott with his little girl. She was dressed like an astronaut, wearing a space helmet that had very obviously started life as one of Hank or Scott's Ant-Man helmets, now minus its antennae and painted white. She and Wanda ought to get off the dance floor, she thought. Some one was going to run into them if they kept standing here.
Wanda sighed, a short, exasperated sound, and let her hand drop from Carol's arm "I spent months throwing myself at Vision before he finally accepted that I was interested in him. Am I going to have to do that again?"
"...No," Carol managed, after what felt like eons of awkward silence but was probably only a second or so. "No, you don't -- I didn't know you liked women."
"Only some women." Wanda held both her hands up, ready for Carol to grasp them. "Do you still want to dance?"
Carol took Wanda's left hand in her own, and settled her other hand around Wanda's waist. Wanda took a half-step toward her, the fringe on her dress brushing Carol's legs, and Carol could feel her body heat again, right through the multiple layers of shirt, vest, and suit coat. It was probably her imagination, but it still made her skin tingle and her body tighten.
"I've wanted to all evening," she said. "But I get to lead this time."
End
Gift For: lupus_dragon
Rating: G to PG
Pairings/Characters: Carol, Wanda, assorted other Avengers in the background.
Labels/Warnings: All fluff, no plot.
A/N: Set at an indeterminate point in late Volume 3, post when the chaos entity possesses Wanda but pre-Red Zone.
Prompt: Avengers; fluff; femslash Carol/Wanda: Carol hates magic, even her teammate's magic. However, even she has to admit that magic can come in handy sometimes. Real witches, magic spells, and Carol admitting her feelings for Wanda.
Summary: Carol and Wanda dance at the Avengers Halloween party. There, um, aren’t actually any witches or spells, really, but there is admitting of feelings.
Personally, Carol felt that a costume party was slightly redundant, given that most of the Avengers spent a good forty to sixty percent of their time in costumes anyway, but Jan had been insistent on it. Any excuse for her to design clothing and dress half the team up like living dolls was not to be missed.
Carol had already seen Jan, Wanda, and Jen's costumes -- two flappers and a Garbo-esque silent screen vamp -- earlier that week, and it was obvious that all three had come from Jan's drawing board. Jan had offered Carol a one-of-a-kind reproduction 1920s dress as well, but with one thing and another -- getting the proofs for her second book sent back to the publishers, three attacks on downtown Manhattan and yet another break out from Rikers Island by the Masters of Evil -- she had never managed to make a single fitting.
She'd put her own costume together, instead, most of it at the last minute. The gangster-style fedora had come from a costume shop, and didn't quite fit, sitting awkwardly on her hair, and the thrift-store black suit was more 1930s than 1920s, but at least she had company in the wrong decade. Vision, currently talking awkwardly with Simon on the far side of the room while both of them avoided Wanda, was gleefully wearing a Sam Spade-style trench coat and fedora.
All of the Avengers' parties had themes, and Halloween was no exception. Tonight's theme was the Roaring Twenties, complete with jazz music and Prohibition.
Well, there would be jazz music, if she and Wanda could ever get the antique Victrola to work.
"I think something's wrong with the tonearm," Carol said, for the second time. "That's why it keeps skipping. That, or these are the wrong kind of records." She glared at the ornate wooden cabinet that concealed the thing's massive amplifying horn, and reminded herself once more that the party's total lack of alcohol was because of Tony's issues, and not because of her.
They had taken her back. They had even cleared her of wrong-doing during the court martial after Kang's attack. They trusted her. Any worries that Cap, Tony, or Wanda were still silently judging her and watching every glass she drank were all in her paranoid imagination.
Wanda frowned at the ancient turntable, rubbing one finger along the tonearm. "They're original 78rpm shellac records from the forties. Cap borrowed them from Vision. They ought to work." Her dark-red, heavily applied lipstick made the frown look more seductively pouty than annoyed; Wanda rarely wore heavy make-up, but the dark eye-liner and boldly colored cupids-bow lips that went with her flapper costume suited her. Wanda's bone structure was strong enough that she looked dramatic, rather than babydoll cute the way that Jan did.
Carol dragged her eyes away from Wanda's lips and back to the record player. "Maybe we should just get Tony to look at it."
"No." Wanda shook her head. "He'll take the entire thing apart, spend half an hour trying to figure out how to make it play more loudly or at a higher fidelity or something, and we'll never get to actually dance."
They were never going to get to dance, anyway, at this point. Half the Avengers were already milling aimlessly around the room, and Jan was giving Carol and Wanda pointed looks. "Let's just go get a CD player."
Wanda bent to peer at the stylus, the fringe on her dress swaying as she moved. "It wouldn't be the same. Old record players have a completely different sound." A pause, then, "I think this is bent."
Carol shrugged. "Don't look at me. I was trained to fly F-15s, not figure out stone age stuff like this."
Wanda raised her eyebrows. "You use a manual typewriter."
"I like the sound the keys make." It was silly, but the loud clacks every time she hit a key made her feel like a real writer. Reporters in old movies always used typewriters, and when she'd first started working for the Bugle, before she'd had enough of Jameson's yelling and quit, Carol had been almost disappointed to walk into the newsroom and see boxy grey desktops, laser printers, and a no smoking sign rather than typewriters and a haze of cigar smoke.
At least, she was pretty sure she'd been disappointed. The memory was distant, like all her memories pre-coma were.
"We had an old record player when Pietro and I were growing up," Wanda said thoughtfully. "More modern than this one, obviously, but still... sometimes I could get it to stop skipping if I just..."
She raised one hand and made a twisting gesture with it, murmuring something under her breath in Transian. Pink and red sparks danced around her fingers, and the Victrola's stylus and tonearm glowed for a moment.
Carol looked away, her stomach twisting, and tried to force the memory of Wanda hanging in midair over her bed, half-naked and writhing in either pain or ecstasy, out of her mind. She'd seen magic used to manipulate people, to possess them, too often. Wanda's possession by Chthon, and then by the manifestation of chaos. What the Shadow King had done to Jessica. Morgan Le Fay's mass delusion, which had been so terrifyingly, convincingly real that she'd had nightmares about being trapped in it for a week afterwards.
Magic warped people's perceptions, got inside their heads and fucked with them on every conceivable level. Remembering Wanda's body glazed with sweat and glowing with power shouldn't turn her on. Wanda had been possessed. Mind-raped. Only a sick, cruel person would have found it hot.
"Do you really have to do that?" Carol asked. "Can't you just whammy it with a hex sphere?"
"Only if I wanted it to explode." Wanda lifted the tonearm and set the stylus carefully against the record. Slightly tinny jazz music began playing, smooth and completely free from skipping. "Hex spheres aren't controlled enough for this kind of thing. The spell fine-tunes it; it makes the chaos energy produce the outcome I want, rather than just random chance. Uncontrolled chaos energy is usually destructive."
Carol made a face. Destructive was putting it mildly. "Tony could have-" she started.
"But this way he doesn't need to."
Fifteen minutes later, when Tony still hadn't shown up, Carol was forced to admit, if only to herself, that enchanting the record player to play properly was much better than standing around for a quarter of an hour with no music.
She had danced with Vision twice, despite the uncomfortable twinge of guilt she felt over dancing with Wanda's ex-husband while Wanda was right there in the room, and once with Steve, to a swing number she knew post-dated the Roaring Twenties by at least a decade.
Dancing with Steve was one of the few things that made Carol feel small and delicate. Several of the men she could remember dating had been no taller than she was, especially when she was wearing heels. She had appreciated that at times, after Marcus had kidnapped her, but Steve was different. He might have been one of the deadliest fighters she knew, and probably capable of taking Carol out despite her super-strength, but he was also genuinely nice and thoroughly non-threatening. Captain America would never take advantage of anybody. Judge them, yes, and kick them off the Avengers for no real reason other than Tony's raging paranoia, but not take advantage of them.
Captain America was also wearing a ridiculous zoot suit that, combined with his massively broad shoulders, made him look like a thug from a James Cagney movie. Unlike most of the other Avengers, he wore it casually, as if it were just another set of evening clothes rather than a slightly silly-looking costume.
"I think he helped Jan pick the costume theme," Wanda was saying, nodding at the dance floor, where Steve and Jan were now dancing extremely athletically to something fast-paced with a lot of saxophone in it. "And I wouldn't be surprised if they chose it just so that the two of them would have an excuse to dance like that."
Steve lifted Jan up onto his shoulders, the short skirt of her dress riding up to flash the tops of her thigh-high -- and period appropriate -- stockings. Carol allowed herself one moment to appreciate the brief glimpse of garter straps and black lace, and then returned her gaze to Wanda. Checking out your straight female teammates was just asking for trouble, even when they weren't already taken. "Doesn't Hank get jealous?"
"I suspect that's part of the point." Wanda said dryly. Then she smiled, and nodded at the dance floor. "Since the only man who isn't avoiding me is currently occupied, would you like to dance?"
Oh, not fair. "Who would lead?" Carol asked, managing to keep her voice light and casual despite the sudden lurch in her stomach at the thought of Wanda in her arms, of putting her hands on Wanda's shoulders, hips, waist and trying to act as if it meant nothing to her.
Lots of women were attractive. Wanda was attractive, brave, witty, and a friend, and that was an unfair combination. The longer Carol worked with her, the harder it was to ignore, and the fact that Wanda had been one of the few superheroes to offer her unwaving support after Marcus had... after Marcus, didn't help.
Watching something else take over her body had been sickeningly, stomach-twistingly wrong. If was an awful thing to watch happen to anyone, but this time... She couldn't remember ever being that frightened for someone else, not even when Tony had nearly died back on the West Coast. Hearing Wanda speak with someone else's voice had filled her with the same cold dread that she'd felt when she'd seen Tony fall out of the sky like a rock, only worse. Tony had still been encased in armor then, had still looked invulnerable, even though she'd known perfectly well that that was an illusion.
Wanda had been half naked, painfully fragile-looking in her pink nightgown, and after that first moment of stunned admiration at the sight of her bare limbs and erotically arched back had come a rush of worry and guilt.
"We can toss a coin," Wanda suggested, and arguing would only have drawn attention to the fact that the idea of dancing with her made Carol uncomfortable.
In the future, Carol decided some moments later, as Wanda swept her backwards into a dip that was made awkward by the fact that Carol was several inches taller than Wanda and outweighed her by about fifteen pounds, she would know better than to try a coin toss against someone who could alter probability.
"Don't think I don't know you cheated." Carol straightened up and stepped toward Wanda, following Wanda's step backwards. This close, she could smell the coconut scent of Wanda's shampoo, and see the smudges in her eye make-up. Her lipstick, in contrast, was still perfect, red and gleaming, and for a moment, Carol felt a reckless urge to mess it up, to smear the artfully stylized bow shape back into something more natural.
Wanda shook her head, her hair swaying, and stretched her arm out to let Carol spin away from her. "I'm actually very bad at slight of hand," she said, which wasn't exactly a denial.
"You're a real live witch." Carol spun away until they were an arm's length apart, still holding hands, then twirled back towards Wanda. "You don't need card tricks." The final turn put her flush against Wanda's front, both of them facing forward.
There was a short, awkward moment as Carol realized that she didn't actually know how to smoothly get from this position back to a proper dancing position -- every time she had done something this fancy before, it had been with a more experienced dancer who had guided her through it.
Wanda seemed to have no more idea what the next step ought to be than Carol did -- they both froze, awkwardly pressed against one another, Carol's arms crossed in front of her and Wanda holding both her hands, and then Wanda released her and took a step back.
Carol turned to face her, trying to move in time with the music and look as if the entire thing had been intentional.
"Sorry," Wanda apologized, taking Carol's hands again and pulling both of them into a much less adventurous swing step. It didn't quite match the music, which was probably written for the jitterbug or the Charleston or some other old time-y dance step Carol had never learned, but nobody in the room other than Steve had ever actually danced those, so it wasn't like it mattered.
"Card tricks are easy," Wanda added, after a few moments during which they had failed to painfully botch any other dance moves. "Cards are all a matter of chance and probability. It's why we don't have an Avengers' poker night anymore."
Wanda was not the sort of person who used her powers for frivolous things, let alone for winning her teammates' money. "I can't believe you'd cheat at that."
Wanda shook her head, a look of amused exasperation on her face. "I didn't. Tony does. He counts cards. He claims that it's subconscious and he can't stop."
Carol snorted. "He would." The music rose to a crescendo, and she lifted their arms and let Wanda twirl in a circle, the long fringe on her dress flying out around her and hitting Carol in the shins.
Wanda laughed, coming to a stop as the song ended. "I feel like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in these outfits."
"Fred Astair always led." Carol pointed out, reaching up to adjust her fedora. It was cheap felt, stiff and not made to fit over long hair, and it kept sliding down over her eyes.
"At least you don't have to do it in heels."
Wanda was staring up at her, still standing slightly closer than she needed to. Carol could almost feel her despite the inches between them, the hair on her arms rising. "Dancing is actually easier in heels," she said, trying to keep her voice as casual and friendly as Wanda's was. "That's the way I learned to do it." Most of the men she'd danced with were inches shorter than her when she wore heels, but a man who couldn't handle the fact that his date was taller than him wasn't worth a second date anyway. Women tended to have fewer hang-ups about that, thankfully. "Anyway, they're from the wrong decade."
"Who would you rather I compare you to?" Wanda asked.
Carol shrugged, racking her brain to think of an actress from the twenties or thirties other than the one whose cousin had founded the de Havilland Aircraft Company. "Marlene Dietrich?
Wanda smiled, looking up at Carol through eyelashes spiky with mascara. "She's the wrong decade, too, but she did look very good in a tuxedo." She let her eyes drop, then slowly looked Carol up and down, with an appreciative look that implied that she thought Marlene wasn't the only one who looked good in men's clothes.
At least, if Carol had given that look to another woman, that's what it would have meant. Was Wanda actually flirting with her?
No, she told herself. She was trying to turn friendly banter into something it wasn't because she wanted Wanda to flirt with her, wanted to excuse herself from the guilt and embarrassment of spending the past few weeks lusting over Wanda by telling herself her interest was returned.
"You should have seen me in uniform," she said. "I looked like a very sexy airline stewardess."
"I'm sure you-" Wanda started to reply, then cut herself off as another song began to play, this one a waltz heavily laced with the crackles and popping sounds of a very old recording. "Would you like to keep dancing?" she asked. Her tone had changed from playful to serious, and Carol, looking into her eyes, had the unnerving sense that Wanda had seen directly through all of her attempts at acting casual. She'd always been able to do that, no matter how hard Carol had tried to hide things -- her drinking, her worries about her powers, her fears of being expelled from the team after Kang's invasion; Wanda had been able to see through the front she had put up each time.
"People will assume things," Carol said, nodding to where Simon and Vision stood by the Victrola, watching the dance floor. Dancing a fast, energetic dance with another woman might just be for fun, especially if there weren't enough male dance partners to go around, but a slow dance was different. Dance with another woman like you meant it, and people started to ask questions, to suspect things. She'd always avoided it when she had still been in the air force, once she'd figured out just how far she could push things before her bisexuality drew the wrong person's attention.
Wanda shook her head, smiling. "When do they not?"
She didn't understand, Carol knew. If she did, she wouldn't dance with Carol and mock flirt with her so casually. "I like women as well as men," she said, feeling her face heat slightly at the effort it still took to actually say those words aloud. "You shouldn't flirt with me if you don't really mean it. I don't try that hard to keep it a secret anymore, so everyone will think you're-"
Wanda laid a hand on Carol's arm, her red-painted fingernails bright against the black of Carol's suit jacket. "When I was a girl, my family would have been completely disgraced if anyone had seen me dancing with another woman like this. Now all I have left is Pietro, and he hates anyone I date on principle anyway. He can't possibly throw a bigger temper-tantrum over another woman than he did over Vision."
Carol blinked at her. Around them, half their teammates were already dancing; Hank with Jan, awkwardly, Clint with Jen, and Scott with his little girl. She was dressed like an astronaut, wearing a space helmet that had very obviously started life as one of Hank or Scott's Ant-Man helmets, now minus its antennae and painted white. She and Wanda ought to get off the dance floor, she thought. Some one was going to run into them if they kept standing here.
Wanda sighed, a short, exasperated sound, and let her hand drop from Carol's arm "I spent months throwing myself at Vision before he finally accepted that I was interested in him. Am I going to have to do that again?"
"...No," Carol managed, after what felt like eons of awkward silence but was probably only a second or so. "No, you don't -- I didn't know you liked women."
"Only some women." Wanda held both her hands up, ready for Carol to grasp them. "Do you still want to dance?"
Carol took Wanda's left hand in her own, and settled her other hand around Wanda's waist. Wanda took a half-step toward her, the fringe on her dress brushing Carol's legs, and Carol could feel her body heat again, right through the multiple layers of shirt, vest, and suit coat. It was probably her imagination, but it still made her skin tingle and her body tighten.
"I've wanted to all evening," she said. "But I get to lead this time."
End