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Sometimes, sitting inside is stifling. There’s no breeze, just the constant low hum of the air conditioning Stark had installed. There’s no freshness, no newness, no cold chill breeze from the mountains.
On those nights and evenings and days she sits on the roof and scatters breadcrumbs for those crows bold enough to draw near.
The birds like her. Or, well. They like the food she brings them. Scraps of sandwiches, the crumbs from bags of crisps, stale cookies and cakes that crumble in her hands.
One of them, the biggest and glossiest of the birds, fixes a beady eye on her and croaks.
As it turns towards winter the birds grow bolder. They’ll take bread from her hands, steal pieces of sausage from her pocket. The biggest one, the glossiest, takes to sitting on her shoulder, the cold bite of it’s claws digging through her shirt and shawl and into her skin.
It’s feathers are warm against her cheek, though, and she finds herself humming old Sokovian lullabies to the birds.
Sometimes, she thinks they understand her. They cock their narrow heads to listen to her when she talks, no matter the language, and when she hums - and eventually sings - they croon along with her in soft-croaked notes.
It’s calming to sit with them. Biggest on her shoulder, next biggest in her lap. The others tuck themselves into the folds of her shawl and under her coat when the snows eventually arrive.
They make it feel like it could be home.
Clint joins her sometimes. He never says anything, she never hears him, but she can feel his presence, see the watching purple orb of his mind at the brink of the roof. She wonders, sometimes, if he thinks she’s going to pitch herself off, other times she finds his mind there already when she wanders up and wonders what demons bring him there as well.
Sometimes she sits at the very edge of the roof, feet dangling down until her heels bounce against the concrete and watches his mind become as focussed as a hawks.
She won’t fall. She won’t pitch herself off. It is a choice, each time, to sit at the brink with scarlet enough to catch her, with the choice to remain, the peace of the birds in her lap and on her shoulder.
She could not upset them any more than she could discard all Pietro had done for her by dying.
“You’re doin’ better than I thought you would,” Clint says one evening. He’s got a bird in his lap too, but his is small and scrawny, feathers scruffy and scraggled. His fingers stroke over them, smooth them into neatness and the crow preens under his hand. “I mean. Half the team thought you’d go completely catatonic, Nat especially.”
Wanda nods. “That’s why you took me away.”
Clint pauses, tilts his head. Sighs. “Yeah,” he says. “S’what I did with Nat, when I brought her in. Gave her space from everyone else, everyone she didn’t know, but made sure she wasn’t alone. When you come out of the place she did, or you did… being alone is the worst thing in the world.”
This is… true. When she had sat up on the roof alone, without the birds, she had floated all too easily. Now, with their presence, she is anchored, given something to do and something to care about beyond simply herself and her grief. Her fingers, gently, find the shape of skull of the bird in her lap.
Sometimes, Clint isn’t there. Some days it’s just her, and the birds. Some days, Clint’s small scraggly bird comes hopping over to her, head tilted, dark eyes bright. She throws it small pieces of food, with her scarlet, knowing her birds won’t touch it. They, she knows, prefer to eat only from her hands.
“He’s called Lucky,” Clint says. “The crow. When I was younger, before the whole-” he waves a hand, his other still smoothing out his crow’s feathers “- Avenging business. I had a dog, well, found him, really. He died a few years ago, a year or two after Lila was born.”
Wanda frowns slightly. She can see the affection strung between bird and human clearly, even without her scarlet sight she can see it in how the bird preens and the hand gentles. But to name for someone lost is not something she thinks she can do.
Clint’s voice is quiet. “My wife and I,” he says - soft, gentle. “We’re having our third child in about a month or so. We’re already set on the first name - Nathaniel, for Natasha, but-” His fingers stutter and pause in Lucky’s feathers, Wanda can almost feel the tension in him.
“Your brother,” Clint says, “Saved my life. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be alive to be able to see my son be born. Laura and I, we were wondering if we could name our son for your brother. Nathaniel Pietro Barton.”
Wanda’s throat feels like lead, her eyes like an ocean. Her fingers tremble in the feathers of her crows.
“I’ll let you think on it,” Clint says.
She doesn’t hear him rise, hear him walk, hear the door close behind him, but she watches his mind leave.
She sings lullabies to the crows. Lucky sits with her a lot, when Clint isn’t there and she takes to smoothing his feathers down when her crows will let her. She doesn’t want to think on what Clint has said. To name someone for one lost - for Mutti or Vati, for Pietro - their names seem almost sacrosanct, untouchable. Names to be held and treasured and never forgotten.
Some niggling part of her mind says but who will remember when you are no more?
But the names are hers, buried in her heart and her head for her to chose the fate of.
She is the last of her family alive.
“Let me meet her,” Wanda says. “Laura. And Lila and your other child. Then I will decide.”
Clint looks up from his bow. He’s doing something with the string, testing it somehow, and the pad of his finger presses on it gently, pulling it out of it’s neat and perfect line from top to bottom.
She can see his mind whirling within it’s purple orb. “Sure,” he says. “I can… we can do that. Do you want them to come here, do you want to meet them in town-”
“I was thinking,” Wanda says softly. “That I could visit you.”
Wanda steps off the Quinjet with a bag over one shoulder and a single bird on the other. As soon as she lands she passes the bird over to Clint, careful hands to careful hands.
“Lucky,” Clint says, surprised.
“I thought you would like to see him.”
Wanda’s eyes are fixed on her hands, palm itching without Lucky’s warmth.
Clint smiles, lifts his hand to let Lucky settle on his shoulder, the crow’s beak threading through Clint’s hair, neatening strands.
“Thank you,” he says. “Now come on. Let’s introduce you to everyone.”
She sees Laura’s mind before she meets her, a huge warm thing, affectionate and observant, waiting in the doorway. She laughs to see Lucky grooming Clint’s hair and then holds out her arms to Wanda.
“You must be Wanda,” she says, wrapping her arms around her. “I’ve heard so much about you.”
Laura hugs her, warm and smelling of tea and cinnamon, dark hair brushing by her cheek and for a moment Wanda remembers long ago, remembers Mutti putting her and Pietro to bed.
It is only for a moment, stuttering and brief and a memory she had almost thought forgot.
Laura steps back, a little unwieldy with the weight of her belly and holds Wanda at arms length. “Let’s get you something to drink,” she says, “And then we’ll show you to your room.”
Wanda sets her bag down behind the seat she’s offered and accepts chamomile tea when it’s offered. It’s been growing harder to see minds, to reach into them and she thinks that, in part, this is because after losing Pietro she has not tried to touch minds lest she feel that pain again. But, regardless, seeing new minds strains her, makes her want to reach even though she can’t and won’t and she can feel a headache behind her eyes.
Laura sits opposite her, a mug of decaf tea in her hand, and Clint calls his children down so she can meet them, Lila and Cooper and so similar to him and to Laura in their smiles it strikes her. She can see the fondness in the smiles Laura and Clint respond with, see the simple love the family all shares like bright bonds between them and she knows, no matter what name this third child is given, it will be loved.
And, some part of her niggling mind whispers, they would name him for your brother.
Wanda doesn’t know what to do with that.
When night comes she can’t sleep. She sneaks outside, considers trying to climb a tree but decides against it in the darkness. Instead, she settles on the creaking swing-seat, hands holding her still and in place even as her feet dangle and the seat grumbles beneath her.
It’s peaceful out here in the nowhere-space, so far from everything else. The stars are brighter, the night darker. At the far end of the field the woods loom and in the between-space insects buzz and sing. She does not see the dark shapes of her crows until the largest settles on the seat beside her.
Oh, she thinks.
She buries her hands in the thick feathers at their necks, smooths the feathers ruffled from flight back to smoothness and lets them settle, softly croaking, beside her.
They had followed her.
She’s been there for a few hours, mumbling lullabies and asking questions of the crows, when Laura comes softly clattering downstairs and pokes her head out the door.
“Wanda?” she asks.
Wanda’s smile is tentative and her hands do not leave feathers.
“I was going to make some tea and wait for the baby to settle. Would you like company?”
Wanda smiles, shrugs, continues stroking the birds.
“Chamomile for you?” Laura asks and Wanda smiles properly.
“Please.”
Laura lowers her weight onto the seat carefully. She’d set Wanda’s mug onto the wicker table at her side before even trying to take her seat, and the hand not cradling a cup of tea is gently rubbing the curve of her belly.
They sit in perfect silence, until one of the crows hops towards Laura.
“Oh,” Laura says softly, moving her hand from her stomach gently towards the bird. It preens under her gentle touch and Wanda cannot help smiling. “Are these ones yours?” Laura asks.
Wanda shrugs. “They follow me,” she whispers. “They were at the facility. I don’t… I think they followed me here.”
Laura’s hand gently strokes the crow by her leg, smoothing down feathers, running her nails gently over the neat line of it’s head. “What’re they called?”
Wanda has no answer. She hasn’t named them - they’re simply her birds, her crows, the ones which keep them company. She doesn’t remember them by name but by face and form and flight; they simply are to her, as Pietro was, names unnecessary for her to know them as them.
“They don’t have any,” she says. “They just are.”
Laura finishes her tea and heads back inside, back upstairs. Wanda stays with the birds and watches the stars. When she wakes she’s curled on her side on the creaking dew-dropped seat, her shawl tucked tight over her shoulders, her crows pressed close to her side.
Clint is standing in the doorway, munching on a piece of toast, holding a mug of coffee. The smells - of toast, of coffee, remind her of Sokovia, of walking to school, of the streets and suddenly she is breathtakingly hungry.
“There’s plenty inside,” Clint says, gesturing. “And there should be bird food by the back door.”
It’s peaceful. No matter the noise of Lila and Cooper, the croaking of her crows, the constant subtle tension as the birthdate draws nearer, the farm carries a kind of peace and Wanda settles into it gladly.
“You're doing okay?” Clint asks on her third night there. She’s sat on the swing-seat again, her crows around her, and Clint’s sat on the steps stroking Lucky.
“I think so,” Wanda says. “At least, I am doing better .”
Better than when her brother’s death was still fresh and raw, better than days of floating aimlessly just watching. She is doing better in general, playing with Lila and Coop, helping Laura cook and organise, helping Clint build.
It’s nice, she finds, to have purpose, even fleetingly.
“You finding it okay here?” he asks. “Not too stressful?”
It’s lovely here, she thinks. There is no pressure to pick up and move on, no expectation that she be enemy or friend or some other form of foe. Simply that she be . She likes it.
She wonders if Clint will ask the question turning so clearly in his mind.
“I like it,” she says eventually. “It feels…” She would have the words, in Sokovian, but here, sleepy, in English, she does not. “You have made a home here,” she says. “It feels like that. Like a home. Safe. Loved.”
“Could be a home to you, if you wanted.”
Wanda thinks, considers. Gently cups the crow in her lap, moves slowly so she doesn't startle the ones on her shoulders, and sits by Clint.
“You may name your son for my brother,” she says.