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When Wanda was stabbed from behind while on a mission, it was Pietro who screamed.
Wanda spun to face her attacker, flinging one hand wreathed in scarlet in front of her even as blood blossomed across the back of her jacket. Her power threw the man off his feet; he landed hard on the pavement and stayed down, unconscious. Wanda dropped to one knee. Pietro was at her side in an a flash of silver and blue, abandoning his own fight against the remaining members of the HYDRA sleeper cell. He checked her injury, pulling her jacket aside with one hand while the other pressed unconsciously against his own back.
“Evac her!” Steve called to them—unnecessarily; Pietro was already sweeping Wanda into his arms.
Wanda woke in a clinical white room with an IV in her arm and her brother curled in a chair with his hand tangled in hers. His head jerked up as she opened her eyes, and in the blink of an eye he was on his feet and bending over her, mind broadcasting a mixture of relief and concern as he murmured her name.
Wanda smiled up at him in a way she hoped was reassuring. Pietro settled on the side of her bed, carefully avoiding her injury as he wrapped his arms around her shoulders. His touch was, as always, reassuringly familiar, and Wanda relaxed against him as the sleepy haze began to clear from her mind.
She watched as Pietro leaned over her and pressed the call button beside her bed. “Must you?” she asked.
He settled back beside her. “The doctors need to make sure that you are okay.”
“I am okay.” Which he should know. “Feel—it doesn’t even hurt.”
Pietro snorted. “That’s because you are doped up to here on painkillers.” He raised a hand to indicate. “You could be dying and we wouldn’t feel a thing.”
“I’m not dying,” Wanda said. His words had been hyperbole, but it was an exaggeration that she knew hid real fear behind it. “Come here.”
Pietro ducked his head towards her, allowing her to slide her fingers up his cheek and into his hair, dragging wisps of scarlet along with her fingers. She pressed her forehead to his, slipping easily into his mind. He sent her his memories of the time she’d been unconscious—two days, as it turned out—starting with the moment she’d been wounded. The sight of blood soaking her clothes, his frantic race back to the compound, how frightened he’d been when the pain in his side had suddenly disappeared after he’d been kicked out of the room for her surgery, and he’d thought, he’d thought—but it had only been the morphine.
The most recent twenty-four hours had been uneventful by comparison, just him sitting vigil at her infirmary bed, but he offered up those memories anyway alongside the others. As Pietro’s mental images had caught up with the present, it was almost as if Wanda had been there and conscious to witness them herself—almost as if they had never been separated, just as they preferred.
Pietro retreated to his chair while the doctor checked her over, but by the time Wanda’s next visitor knocked on the door, he had returned to his spot on the edge of her bed.
Steve Rogers smiled at Wanda as he entered, a genuine smile backed by a brief surge of mental warmth. (Hmm. She hadn’t meant to enter his mind. Perhaps Pietro was right about the painkillers.) “Glad to see you’re awake,” he commented. “You had us worried there for a moment.”
“How did the mission go?” Wanda asked. Pietro hadn’t paid much attention, after she’d been wounded. He knew that the other Avengers had made it back to the compound unhurt, and little more.
Steve waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, it was a success. We captured the ones we were after, and we think we got some good intel from their computers. If it weren’t for what happened to you, I’d have said it went off without a hitch.” He looked at them, and smiled again—but this time there was something that rang slightly false in the expression.
“Is something wrong?” Wanda asked.
“Wrong?” Steve repeated. “No. But, uh.” He ran a hand through his hair, looking vaguely embarrassed. “Can I ask you guys something?”
“You can ask,” Pietro muttered.
He was always cranky when Wanda was injured; she stroked his arm to calm him. “Of course you can,” she assured Steve.
“Natasha noticed something,” he told them. “When Wanda was hurt. Pietro, you, uh.”
The twins looked at each other, and Wanda could feel Pietro tensing up against her side and in her mind. Even years later once they were out of the orphanages and onto the streets, when they had no guardians left to keep them apart, they never mentioned it in front of other people. Other people assumed enough about them already. The existence of platonic soulmates was no secret, but soulmate bonds were rare enough that most people encountered them far more often in books and movies than in real life—in dramatic tales of epic, fated romances or tragic star-crossed lovers. Wanda knew that insisting that she and Pietro weren’t like that wouldn’t convince someone who’d already made up their mind.
But they had never outright lied about it, either, and Wanda didn’t intend to start now. She wasn’t ashamed. “He felt my pain, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“Okay,” said Steve. It was lucky for him that Wanda had already decided to tell the truth, because he was using his you-can-trust-me-I’m-Captain-America voice, which she hated. “Just because of your powers?” He gestured vaguely at his head.
“No,” Wanda said. “We’re soulmates.”
Steve nodded. “Okay,” he said again—and nothing more, though he was eyeing them with curiosity.
And this was the reason they usually didn’t tell people. “If you have questions,” Wanda said, trying not to sound irritated, “just ask them.”
Steve held up his hands. “It’s not any of my business,” he said. “I don’t want to pry, if it’s something you prefer not to talk about.”
“I prefer that you ask us your questions, rather than look at us and wonder,” she snapped.
For a moment, Steve said nothing as he looked at them, considering. “When did it manifest?” he finally asked. “During the experiments?”
It wasn’t the question that Wanda had expected. She shook her head. “When we were ten.”
They had been clutching each other other under the meager protection of a bedframe, breathing in dust and ash and waiting to die, when the bond had emerged. Neither had realized it at the time: in the cramped, dark space, there had been no way for Wanda to know that the ache in her ankle corresponded to a sprain in her brother’s limb rather than her own, or for Pietro to realize that the sensation of scraped flesh along his arm would have been belied by his unbroken skin had he looked at it. Only later, after days in the hospital, had they realized.
In hindsight, all of the ingredients had been there. A strong interpersonal connection. A moment of heightened emotion. And whatever rare, undefinable element of compatibility allowed some pairs to develop a spontaneous psychic connection, while the rest of the world, no matter how devoted to their loved ones, went through life alone in their own minds.
From the research she’d done, Wanda knew that soulmate studies were far from an exact science. Still, some things were consistent. Bonds became stronger with close proximity, and especially with touch. They could be weakened with time and distance. Barton had once told her about a man, another agent that he and the Black Widow had worked with a few times, who lived on the opposite side of the country from his soulmate—apparently she’d barely felt a twinge when he broke his leg on a mission.
Wanda couldn’t imagine. She felt it every time that Pietro stubbed his toe.
“That’s pretty young,” Steve said. His voice was neutral. At Wanda’s side, Pietro vibrated with nervous tension.
Wanda shrugged. “That’s one way of looking at it,” she said, keeping her own voice calm. She had looked it up once, on a clunky old computer at the city library when she had been twelve. Soulmate bonds most commonly formed after adolescence, though bonds between teenagers weren’t unheard of. There were stories of soulmate bonds forming even younger, between siblings or childhood friends, of relationships that started out platonic and then either stayed that way or didn’t, but those were rare—and worse, usually ended in the young soulmates being kept apart until they came of age in the name of ‘promoting a healthy sense of self’. Once formed, a soulmate bond of course could never be broken, but the effects could be weakened with prolonged separation.
She had been determined that that would never happen to her and Pietro.
Steve raised an eyebrow at her. “And what’s the other way?”
“Pietro and I had known each other for a decade when our bond formed,” Wanda pointed out. “That’s longer than it takes for most soulmates.”
To her relief, Steve chuckled. “Guess that’s true.” He shook his head, and Wanda could see that the suspicion had faded from his eyes. She relaxed, and could feel the tension leaving Pietro’s body from where he was pressed against her side. “You know, call me old-fashioned, but I always wanted a soulmate,” Steve admitted. “God knows there are times it would have been useful to know if—if someone I cared about was hurting.”
Wanda didn’t need to look into his head to guess that he was thinking of a specific someone —or that by ‘was hurting,’ he meant, ‘was even still alive’.” She did wonder, though, if it might have been easier for her and Pietro to have been open about their bond if they’d been born in Steve’s time, back when most people still saw having a soulmate as a blessing instead of an attack on their individualism, before neurologists and psychologists and biochemists decided to analyze to death a phenomenon which couldn’t be analyzed.
Of course, with a Jewish father and a mother descended from the Romani, if they had been born in Steve’s time—better not to think about it. “So it’s not a problem?” she asked.
Steve shook his head. “Shouldn’t be. I wish you’d told us sooner, so we’d’ve known that both of you might go down if one of you was hurt bad enough, but I understand why you didn’t.” He looked at pair of them thoughtfully. “Actually, it does explain a few things.”
“Like what?” Pietro asked, immediately defensive.
“Like why you were such a good patient when you were laid up with those bullet wounds,” Steve said, nodding in Pietro’s direction. “You know, a lot of guys, they want to show they’re tough, so they don’t take their pain meds, or they don’t listen to the doctor and re-injure themselves trying to walk around before they’re healed.”
Pietro folded his arms across his chest. “I wouldn’t do that to Wanda.”
The corner of Steve’s mouth twitched. “I know,” he said, sounding amused. “Like I said, it explains a few things.”
Wanda rested her head back against the pillows. Though not the worst thing that the twins had ever been through, it wasn’t a time that she liked to remember. Pietro had managed to save Clint Barton, and the child, and to dodge most of the bullets spraying towards them—but not all of them. Wanda would never forget the sharp pains that had stabbed through her body, nor her fear when that pain had suddenly stopped. Her powers had kept her sane, as she reached out across the falling city to grasp at his mind with her own, allowing her to recognize the void he was fading into as unconsciousness rather than death.
“Anyway, I should let you get some rest,” Steve said. He made as if to leave, but stopped and turned around before he reached the door. “Oh, and a quick piece of advice? Don’t mention this to Tony.”
“We did not plan to,” Pietro said dryly. They had learned to coexist peacefully with Stark, and for the most part he showed what Wanda had come to realize was an uncharacteristic level of consideration in leaving them their space, but they did not like him.
Even so, Steve’s pre-emptive intervention was unusual. “Is there a reason in particular we shouldn’t?” Wanda asked. “Would he take it badly?”
Steve laughed. “Oh, it’s not that serious. It’s only that—this soulmate stuff, it drives him nuts. I’ve heard him talking about it, how unscientific it is, that nobody’s been able to figure out why it happens or how it works. Give him the chance to ask you questions, and I’d bet you’ll never hear the end of it.”
Wanda smiled slightly despite herself. Yes, she could picture that. “Thank you for the warning,” she said.
Pietro sighed once Steve had left. “Why am I not surprised that it was the Black Widow who caught us?” He turned to lay on his side next to her, propping himself up on his elbow and running his fingers idly through her hair.
Wanda hummed in agreement. “I’m only surprised none of them figured it out sooner,” she said. They hadn’t met many other pairs of soulmates, but Wanda knew that her bond with Pietro was stronger than most, transferring even minor discomforts. That their secret had lasted this long could likely be credited more to her powers than to either of them being good enough actors to suppress their responses to each other’s pain: simultaneous reactions even when they were in different rooms could be explained by a psychic bond just as easily as a spiritual one, after all.
Though Wanda was not at all certain that the two links were separate from one another, or from the emotional bonds of siblinghood and shared trauma. Pietro’s had been the first mind she had ever been able to enter, and remained the easiest. And even before the experiments, Wanda had often felt cold when they were too far apart from one another. Pietro, meanwhile, complained of feeling the distance between them like an itch under his skin. She wondered sometimes if that was a soulmate thing or simply a twin thing; if she had felt the effect on the rare occasions they had been apart as young children prior to the bombs, she couldn’t remember it.
The painkillers were beginning to wear off in earnest, Wanda noticed. It was not the sharp pain that had jolted her when she’d been stabbed, but she did ache—mostly from the injury, though she suspected part of it was from the day and night Pietro had spent sitting hunched in a chair.
She wasn’t surprised when Pietro’s fingers stilled in her hair, and he frowned at her. “You’re hurting. Should I call the doctor?”
“No, not yet.” She’d accept the painkillers long before the pain became unbearable—she wouldn’t subject Pietro to that unnecessarily any more than he would her—but it wasn’t there yet, and she wanted to stay awake and alert a while longer. Even with the pangs of discomfort, it was nice to lie here, alive and on her way to recovery, knowing that her brother beside her and that her team was safe.
And there was one more conversation she still needed to have before she allowed sleep to claim her again.
Wanda reached up to take Pietro’s hand in her own. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said quietly.
But guilt she’d been sensing from her brother’s mind since she had woken up only intensified, and images of daydreams not her own flickered across her mind, scenario after scenario in which he’d noticed her attacker and pulled her away or killed the man first before he could hurt her. “I should have been faster.” He curled into her as he spoke, pressing his face against her hair. “If I’d been paying more attention—I could have stopped it.” His tone was hushed as if he were confessing a great sin.
Wanda squeezed his hand, then dropped it to rub gently at his shoulder. “You were doing your job.”
Pietro made an unhappy noise. “My job is to protect you.”
“Not when I tell you to do something else.” At that, he huffed a laugh into her hair. “Anyway, it’s over now. I’m fine. We are fine.”
“This time,” Pietro pointed out. “The next time…”
“Worrying about the future,” Wanda said, “is definitely not your job. Leave that to me.”
He laughed again, quiet but genuine. Wanda smiled too, though she knew he couldn’t see it. “And what is my job, then?” he asked.
Wanda pondered for a moment. “Right now?” she said. “Right now, you are to hold your injured sister, and stop worrying so loudly so that she can rest. Can you do that?”
“You’re very demanding,” he said, and slipped an arm around her, carefully avoiding her IV. “But I think I can manage.”
Wanda allowed her eyes to drift closed, warm and comfortable in her brother’s embrace. She shifted closer to him, and felt him relax. She’d seen in his mind that he’d barely slept since she’d been injured; he was almost as exhausted as she was. Bound by blood and pain and trauma, but by love most of all, together, they slept.