Chapter Text
Pietro took a deep breath as he passed through the main computer bank. He smiled towards the HYDRA workers, but kept to himself, like the scared lab-rat he needed them to believe he was. He held onto the mockery of a picnic basket, breathing carefully so his hands didn't shake as he walked to the staircase in the back.
Most of them knew damn well that he and Wanda had only just earned their freedom to move around the castle – and neither of them were eager to risk it. But, a man could bring his sister lunch, and even HYDRA wouldn't think twice about it.
He prayed no one looked closely at the newspaper he had tucked into the basket.
It took several flights of stairs, but he found his sister in the small lounge outside their 'quarters', which were really prison cells with the doors unlocked. She was focused on the pen and paper on the table in front of her – practicing dexterity with her powers. She was getting better…though she still had a long way to go. The things she wrote by controlling the pen still looked like they were written by a child.
"Wanda," he called out. Aware of the guards just by the door, he kept his voice light as he walked up to her. "Picnic on the terrace?"
She had a bemused eyebrow already raised as she turned around to face him, but her countenance froze when she saw his terrified eyes.
However, they hadn't gotten this far in life by being stupid. She played along, saying, "Is that allowed, yet?"
Pietro made a show of glancing at the guards, then looking back at her. "I guess we'll find out. We'll eat by the windows if not."
While the guards made a pointed note of them going outside, no one actually stopped them.
The terrace was more like a large balcony, centuries old stone railings with a slim bench underneath parts of it. It was on this bench that he lay down the plastic basket of dumplings – and the newspaper underneath it.
He asked her about how her telekinetic writing was going, in his usual volume, glancing at the guards. She caught on and started an excited retelling of her developments, and annoyed ranting at her frustrations. This went on long enough that the guards seemed to start tuning them out. As she seemed to "calm down", they didn't start paying attention again. Pietro started some idle chit-chat about the local gossip. Even in HYDRA, people slept with those they shouldn't, and everyone knew about it.
As soon as they were quiet enough that they couldn't possibly be overheard, yet loud enough that the guards weren't concerned, Pietro asked, "Do you remember your children?"
Wanda stared at him, stunned. "From when we were still children?"
"Yes," he said. "The ones you had to give up."
He still remembered the night he had, in a stroke of idiocy, left his sister alone with the American doctor who'd paid orphans to be test subjects for his vaccine study. One night, when she couldn't make it back to the orphanage in time, but he could. One night, when he thought his sister would be safe in a doctor's office while he made sure they weren't noticed missing at the orphanage. One night was all it took for a monster to take advantage of his sister.
Making sure the orphanage didn't notice they were missing at night meant nothing once they noticed she was pregnant.
They'd become vagrants, then lab-rats again, then fugitives. The Night Nurse, the one and only good person in SHIELD, had been both a blessing and a curse. A curse, for Wanda was never able to find her children after giving them up to the safety of an American adoption agency. A blessing, because neither would HYDRA.
Or so he'd thought, until this morning.
"The ones we lost?" she murmured. They hadn't talked of her long-lost children in years. If the children had survived, they'd be older now than Wanda was when she gave birth to them.
Of course, it was no longer an 'if'.
Not saying a word, he casually unfolded his newspaper. Flipping through the pages and glancing at the guards, he made a loud remark about looking forward to the day he could go to see a game in person again. He turned to the international section, to the pictures.
He knew what he looked like when he was running, what Wanda looked like when she used her powers.
The two American teenagers whose bodies glowed like his own and Wanda's. Only their eyes were visible behind their masks. But even in a picture as blurry and distant as this one, there was no mistaking them.
He remembered little of his childhood, but he remembered his mother's eyes. They were staring back at him from the newspaper picture, taken across the world.
Wanda choked down her gasp as she stared, seeing what he did. Pietro explained, anyway.
"They're alive."