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The orphanage was crowded, underfunded and unprepared for the flood of children whose families were ripped away by the bombs. Wanda and Pietro barely noticed. To them, it was enough to be given food and shelter; everything they wanted beyond that—their loving parents, their home, their innocence and childish dreams—had been obliterated in an instant, and could never be recovered.
For two years they kept to themselves, quietly helping each other with their homework and their chores during the day, and escaping their constant nightmares by sneaking into each other’s rooms to curl around each other at night. If any adults noticed, none cared; there were too many children—so many of them so young, infants and toddlers crying for their parents—for anyone to waste energy trying to separate a pair of otherwise well-behaved siblings.
And yet, like the happy childhood they’d lived Before, this fragile equilibrium could not last. For while all the youngest orphans were crowded into the one small building, there were two homes for older children: one for boys, and one for girls. They would not see each other except at school, and if one of them were to end up fostered without the other to a family in a different part of the city, possibly not even that.
“What do we do?” Pietro asked one day, as their thirteenth birthday approached.
“We run,” Wanda told him.
And so they did. They had few possessions: all their childhood toys and trinkets were lost to the bombs, and the resources of the orphanage were too scarce to supply more than a few pairs of clothes to the children in its care. Everything they had went in their ragged, thread-bare backpacks.
The next day, the twins went to school as usual, but they did not return. The streets of Novi Grad were cruel and cold, but with the harsh conditions came a kind of freedom: there was no one to take them away from each other.
The men who approached their group of ragtag protesters did not identify themselves as HYDRA. They claimed to be independent scientists, Sokovian patriots who would empower citizens to fight back against the local corruption and international imperialism that had left Sokovia in hunger and ashes.
The twins looked at one another; no need for words between them. Even without knowing as they would know later that the men were hiding their affiliation to a brutal Nazi organization, they were not so naive as to blindly trust the vague promises of a stranger. Pietro’s body was tight with tension, eyes flickering from the newcomers to his sister and then back again. Wanda was uncertain: even if the men were telling the truth, she knew there was unquestionable danger in agreeing to such experimentation.
And yet: for the first time since she was ten, she saw the future unfolding with possibility. Passion and anger were all well and good, but true change required power, and this opportunity promised her that. The power to survive, as they had been doing only barely since they were children. The power to thrive, to make right the things that were wrong.
The power to take their revenge on Tony Stark at last.
She looked at Pietro; he was watching her, gaze implacable and unwavering. They might die from this, but like her, he was willing to take that risk. He would follow her lead, whatever she chose.
Wanda turned to the men and nodded.
When Wanda touched the Cradle, she wanted only to satisfy her curiosity, sparked as it was by the oddness of the mind inside.
Instead, she saw an apocalypse. Fire, death, mushroom clouds. Ultron would destroy the world .
His vague assurances of opportunities for humanity’s redemption barely registered; she knew bullshit when she heard it, and by the look on Pietro’s face as he turned from stroking her hair to eye the protesting robot, so did her brother.
Wanda weighed their options. If she turned back now, then all of it—the planning, the agony of the sceptre, the deaths in Johannesburg—would be for nothing.
But if she didn’t turn back...no. That was no choice at all.
She would not be Tony Stark. She would take responsibility for her actions and their consequences. She would stop this before it went any further, before any more children had their parents ripped away.
“When the Earth starts to settle,” Ultron was saying, “God throws a stone at it. And believe me, he’s winding up. We have to evolve. There’s no room for the weak.”
“And who decides who’s weak?” Pietro’s voice, quiet and skeptical; he clearly knew the answer as well as she did. With a surreptitious twist of her hand, Wanda directed her scarlet to free the mind of the doctor. The woman blinked, her eyes clearing.
“Life,” Ultron responded. “Life always decides.”
Pietro turned to look at her. Wanda met his eyes, silent agreement passing between them. And the moment Ultron was distracted, once again, they ran.
“Stay here,” Wanda commanded her brother, as Novi Grad fell from the sky. “Help me to defend the core.” He did.
Neither of them would ever know the impact of that particular decision.
In theory, Pietro might almost have agreed with Tony Stark. It was his experience that American bombs and American superheroes tended to go where Americans wanted them to with little regard for anyone else’s feelings on the subject.
But as usual, the ideas which might have sounded good on paper suffered in implementation from the selfish agendas of the men with the power to make them reality. In practice, Wanda was put under house arrest. Wanda was, effectively, imprisoned, even if the prison was a pretty one on the surface. There was never any question of where Pietro’s loyalties would lie.
“Just say the word,” he murmured in her ear. “Tell me you want to run, and I’ll take you far away from here, I promise. We can go where they’ll never be able to find us.”
Wanda shook her head. “I’m not running,” she told him. Her answer didn’t surprise him; Wanda was stubborn and brave and had always been more closely attached to this team—to this life—than he was.
(Pietro knew immediately what her decision really meant. If they would not run, then they must, eventually, fight. That was fine with him; he had been fighting since he was ten years old.
And yet...he’d liked being an Avenger, though he wouldn’t have admitted it. After over a year as part of a team that thought itself a family, a year of being called a hero by the media and the public, he’d almost started to believe—
—but nevermind. Wanda was his family, and there were no such thing as heroes.)
So when the time came, they fought; after that, they were taken to a prison that didn’t even pretend to be pretty; eventually, of course, they ran. They had each other, and if that wasn’t all that they had ever wanted, it was at least all that they would ever need.