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“I’ll protect it,” Wanda says when Barton asks about the core. The answer comes easily: she has the power to do this, and the responsibility for her role in what has happened today, and so she will. “It’s my job.”
He nods at her, immediately accepting her decision. He’s a good man, Barton. Still breathing hard from the adrenaline of the fight, Wanda turns to watch the rest of the Avengers leave.
All but one, of course. She feels him arrive, the tell-tale pull in the back of her mind telling her when her brother is coming for her that she’s been able to feel as far back as she can remember, long before Strucker’s experiments allowed her to sense anyone else’s minds. “Get the people on the boats,” she tells her brother.
Pietro’s reaction is as immediate as it is predictable. “I’m not going to leave you here.”
Wanda feels a surge of fondness for him, her darling devoted brother—but they have no time for protectiveness now. “I can handle this,” she tells him, and hexes to destruction a robot which has kindly arrived in time to prove her point. “Come back to me when everyone else is off. Not before.” He grunts, reluctant. “You understand?”
Pietro looks up at her, one side of his mouth pulling into a familiar smirk. “You know, I am twelve minutes older than you.”
Wanda laughs despite herself. “Go,” she says, and Pietro, despite his protests, does as he always eventually does: what she tells him to.
The power comes to her easily now. Each fight with another of Ultron’s sentries leaves her desperate for the next, though whether the buzz under her skin is a result of the blood-red energy itself or simply the thrill of victory, of destruction, she could not say. It’s like a dance, almost, seizing each robot in turn and tearing it apart. The pile of metal parts builds up around her, and she has never felt so alive.
Between one moment and the next, everything changes. Pain explodes through her body and behind her eyes. For a moment, she thinks that she has been killed.
And then she understands. An icy chill grips her heart, the enemies around her momentarily forgotten as she casts her mind out, terrified in a way she hasn’t been since she was ten years old. This side of her powers is not one she’s ever tried to use at such a distance, but that is no matter now. Reaching out, she feels the mind of a child, frightened and confused. She feels Clint Barton, relief at his own survival growing into horror as he takes in the sight of the wounded man in front of him. And she feels her brother, more surprised at his own impulsively altruistic act than he is by the bullets ripping through his body.
Wanda grasps with all her power at his mind, his spirit, but already she can feel him fading. Already his mind grows fuzzy. She reaches for him with everything that she is, her sense of her own body growing distant as the boundaries between their selves collapse, and his pain once more becomes her pain as his mind becomes her mind, his thoughts become her thoughts.
Wanda, he is thinking. Wanda, I —
And then he is gone.
Wanda finds herself back in her own body. She falls to her knees. A cry rips from her throat as her world goes scarlet.
No.
Wanda’s blood pounds with rage like she has never known. She is furious, furious at Ultron, furious at Barton, furious at the world for being so cruel as to allow this to happen, furious with Pietro for doing something so damn reckless, for breaking a lifetime’s worth of promises to always stay with her. Furious with herself most of all, because she had been so insistent that he leave her, so certain that she could protect herself that it hadn’t occurred to her that Pietro might be the one in need of protection. And now he is—but he was alive just moments ago, so surely there is something—Wanda can still do something —she can—
if she can just—
she needs to—
it just isn’t right that he should die, she refuses to believe that—
she refuses —
The world shatters in a blaze of crimson.
When the scarlet fades from her vision, Wanda finds herself standing surrounded by the Avengers as they have a too-familiar conversation about evacuating the city. Disoriented, she blinks.
“What about the core?” asks Barton.
She answers him automatically, as if reciting lines she’d learned for a play. “I’ll protect it. It’s my job.” Can it really be…?
And then as the Avengers scatter, and the blur that is her brother stops in front of her, she changes the script. “Stay close to me,” she tells Pietro. “We’ll do this together.”
He smiles at her, eyes glinting.
Together, they rip their enemies to pieces.
It isn’t until later that she finds out that Clint Barton is dead. The child he’d been protecting isn’t, frightened and crying in his mother’s arms, but unharmed.
Perhaps she could have saved both of them, rescuing her brother without dooming Barton by tweaking the world in some other way, but some fundamental part of her does not believe it to be so. Deep down she is certain: this was the price. One life for another. A brutally practical trade. She hadn’t known the price when she decided to pay it, of course, but even if she had, she would have done exactly the same. That should bother her, perhaps.
It doesn’t.
The flight back to America, when everything is finally over, is almost entirely silent. She can feel the weight of the loss bearing down on each of the remaining Avengers. Wanda grieves with them; Barton’s sacrifice, while necessary, is a genuine tragedy.
Her hand tightens around Pietro’s, her thumb brushing over his wrist to feel where his pulse beats as fast as a hummingbird’s. He turns in his seat to look at her; no psychic powers are necessary to understand the question in his eyes. “I’m all right,” she reassures him. He continues to look at her, brow ruffled in concern. She reaches up to cup his face in her other hand, fingers ghosting across his mouth so she can feel the puff of his breath.
Pietro gazes at her like he always does, like she holds the secrets to the universe. Which now she does, she realizes, and the thought delights her to the point where she feels she must share the thrill with him, so she withdraws her hand and presses her own lips to his mouth instead.
When she finally pulls back, Pietro gasps her name as if it were a prayer. Wanda doesn't know if anyone is watching them, listening to them. As her brother’s hands move up to curl themselves in her hair, she finds that she does not care. She is alive, and Pietro is alive, and they are together. And with the new power thrumming in her veins, the call of a thousand possible realities singing for her attention, she is certain she can keep it that way, forever.
Viscerally aware of the worlds at her fingertips, Wanda presses another kiss to her brother’s mouth. It is like Pietro has always promised her: nothing will ever tear them apart.
She'll make sure of it.