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“You’re getting better at this.”
The smile feels almost foreign on her skin, stretching the corners of her mouth as Wanda holds out her hand. She pulls Sam to his feet, wings retracting into the metal apparatus on his back, goggles pushed up his forehead. Sam radiates goodness in a way she’s never seen. An impenetrable light spreads through him like the wires of his veins, existing in spite of the stains of mourning, lingering in the narrow corners of his mind — a war, a battle, a dead best friend.
Sam dreams of him, tossing uncomfortably on his mattress, half his body sprawled on the floor of his temporary quarters. Wanda cannot block out the nightmares. Their rooms share a wall. Sam’s dormant pain mixes with her own, carving her up from the inside out. She rarely sleeps but Sam wakes restful, up by five for his morning run with Steve. Wanda naps for an hour, exhaustion pulling her under before she hears the ghost of her brother’s laugh. She wakes before he can manifest in her mind.
No one speaks of him.
He’s a stranger to the others. A convenient soldier lost in the line of duty; a body, frozen in a basement capsule.
It’s Clint who puts him there. “Tony’s got this plan,” he says. “When he gets too old we’re gonna put him on ice, like Cap. Fifty years later they’re gonna open him up and put his brain in a robot or something. I’m not saying we should do that with Pietro but —” His hand’s on her shoulder. “Miracles happen, right? Better to keep him around just in case.”
Miracles. It’s what she is. What her brother was. Two extraordinary, inexplicable events.
“A voice from a burning bush,” their mother used to say. “My two little miracles.”
||
Their mother is dead.
Wanda shoulders her memory in the weight of her mother’s rosary, wrapped around her wrist and weaved through her fingers, gold cross hot in her palm as she kneels at her bed and prays. Her faith is thin but she believes in her mother, in the ritualistic practices given to them before her death.
She prays for peace — for herself and those around her — for the strength to crawl from bed, for the will to honor the memory of her dead without choking on nuclear clouds of rage. Sometimes it helps. Other times she collapses beneath unanswered questions, hurled at the sky, at her mother, at Pietro.
“Why did you leave me?” she calls out. “Why would you leave me here, alone?”
||
Two Sundays, out the month, she has dinner with the Barton’s. Laura fixes her cheeseburgers, hot dogs, apple pie, quintessential American dishes to acclimate her to her new home. Clint drinks bottled beer and shares watered down tales of espionage, his children perched on the edge of their seats, gripping their silverware at every drawn gun or looming cliff.
They shower Wanda with questions, about her accent and her home country. She tells them she has no glittering stories, no fairytales in disguise and Laura, bless her, changes the conversation with a wave of her butterknife.
There’s an effortlessness, an ease, to the Barton household. Their minds oscillate between plates of sugary dessert and abandoned sheets of homework. The children cry about broken game systems and wearing out their favorite pair of shoes. Wanda’s reminded, almost instantly, of the summer Pietro crossed their town in two minutes; joy pinching his cheeks until his toes curled in the dirt, sneakers obliterated. “I ruined them,” he said, swiping violently at his tears. “Mother can’t afford to replace them. What do we do?”
Silence is afforded on the ride back to headquarters. Clint drums his fingers against his thighs until Wanda digs up enough syllables to form a sentence. If she doesn’t, Clint plays music. American and British bands with guitars and power vocals.
Once, Wanda plays him music from her childhood. Clint smiles through the bells and drums and wailing foreign tongues. She knows he hates it, but he reclines and turns the volume higher.
||
“I was born in a lab too.”
They’re outside, Steve’s gaze tipped upward, watching Sam and Vision spin circles in the sky; a wave of grey and purple and gold.
“I mean, not born. Reborn, I guess. This is all,” he waves his hand down the white t-shirt and loose sweatpants, “an experiment.” He pauses. “Like you.”
“You don’t understand,” she says. “We were not made. We were born this way.”
Steve’s eyebrows furrow. “But Strucker —”
“He made us stronger, gave us focus.” Tested and stretched their limits.
Vision soars like a bullet, an arrow climbing high into the clouds. Sam trails after him — up, up, up — until the air thins. Unbreathable.
Steve’s voice is low enough to be swept in the soft gust of wind. “That’s impossible.” He sets his strong jaw, refusing to look at her though her eyes are trained on his profile. Sharp nose, a cut of bone at the cheek, a sweep of blonde hair tickling his forehead. The American, Germanic ideal.
“No,” Wanda says. “Not impossible.”
Sam yells. Vision’s cheating. Higher and higher and higher.
“If you were born…Enhanced. There’s got to be…Others. Right?”
A tight pain settles in her chest, a specter’s grip around her heart. “My brother,” she says, words like barbed cotton.
Steve pales. “Of course.” He clears his throat. “I…”
“And our father.”
Steve’s pause is pregnant and round. “I thought your parents were —”
“Our mother and stepfather are dead,” she says. “Our father is missing.”
“He’s enhanced too?” Wanda nods.
Slowly, Vision lowers himself to Sam’s level, arms outstretched to the vast emptiness above. The pair of them float next to one another, setting up for a race.
“Should we count them off?” Steve says at the same moment Wanda lets it slip: “My mother said he could control metal.”
Steve watches her. Now it’s her turn to fix her gaze on the minuscule figures, artificial gods playing in elevated territory.
“Metal huh?” Steve says as Sam and Vision propel forward. “Ultron wouldn’t have stood a chance.”
||
A crack of lighting and a technicolor rainbow of light startles her from sleep. She rolls onto her feet, peeks through the thick curtain. Thor’s on the front lawn, bent over and clutching his hammer, knees and forehead against the grass. In the dark, she can’t make out the wound split open on his temple but she can sense it. She peers into his mind and spots a great battle, alien lifeforms with razors for teeth, lunging after him as Thor tucks a silver chest beneath his arm.
He sways dangerously to the right, slipping in and out of consciousness. She should help but even after six months with The Avengers, she isn’t sure of her footing. Luckily, the front door swings open, snatching Wanda from her self-contained limbo.
Steve, barefoot in threadbare pajama bottoms, Natasha in jeans and a loose hoodie, wrap their arms around him. They carefully draw Thor to his feet. He wields his hammer, Natasha carries the chest. Wanda rides the wave of their combined mental wavelength, a quiet string of reassurances from Steve, punctured by Thor’s pained grunts.
“You bought us a present,” Natasha says, lathering the humor on thick. “How thoughtful.” Another pained groan falls from Thor’s mouth. Natasha laughs. “We missed you too.”
||
How readily, Wanda wonders, did Steve accept Thor’s existence? The same man who stares at her during their daily training sessions, as if his gaze can lift her layers of skin and bone, pulling apart her soul to find the source of her power.
Steve’s told no one about their conversation, about her enhanced, absent father. He bites his tongue around Natasha, buries the urge beneath his late night conversations with Sam. She knows he’s loyal, will carry her secrets to the grave, even if he doesn’t wholly trust her. But he trusts Thor, the god and the alien, from a world more wondrous than their own.
“It surprised me,” Vision says as a doctor cleans Thor’s wound. “The first time I saw him bleed.”
“Do you bleed?” Wanda asks.
Vision stares at the palms of his hands, dark purple veins almost black. “Mr. Stark assures me that I do, but I do not know.”
||
There are secrets between the group of them but they’ve learned to pretend otherwise. Over weekly dinners they share light conversation about their lives before. Their experiences span decades and months and countries, a unique outlook each time someone opens their mouth. But the large secrets, the ones with power, are shared. Steve demands it.
The seven of them congregate in what counts as their lounge. A large television hangs above an electronic fireplace, a pool table sits near the bar. Four couches, squared off in the center, is where Wanda finds herself, between Vision and Sam and the latter’s nervous energy.
Rhodey paces the length of the room, scrubbing the harsh stubble along his jaw as he eyes the closed chest on the coffee table. “What exactly does this soul gem do?”
“The breadth of its power is uncertain,” Thor says. “But it’s been used to give life to the dead.”
Wanda curls her fingers, nails cutting into her palm. She won’t allow herself to drown in her hope. Not yet. Her back straightens, drawing Steve’s narrow gaze. She ignores him, eyes fixed on the silver box in front of her.
Steve says, “Sounds like something we should destroy,” and Wanda bites the inside of her cheek.
“If only that were possible,” Thor says.
Natasha crosses her arms. “Have you tried?”
Thor nods. “Our failings, and that of those who’ve attempted before, are a testament to the gem’s power. It is invincible.”
“Makes sense,” Sam says. “In a cruel, one-of-us-is-going-to-die-trying-to-destroy-the-gem-that-raises-the-dead kind of way.”
“We aren’t going to destroy it,” Rhodey says. “Not until Tony takes a look at it.”
“No objections from me,” Natasha says.
Steve opens his mouth, a protest thick on his tongue but Rhodey cuts him off. “I’m going to take everyone’s silence as agreement.”
Steve drops his head. “Yes, sir.”
“Good,” Rhodey says. “Thor, lock this thing up.”
||
“I can’t read minds,” Vision says on their slow walk to the living quarters, “but I’ve found that my level of perceptiveness is much higher than the rest of the team.”
They’ve left the others behind — Rhodey on the phone with Pepper while the others knock back shots of vodka, the future a haze of uncertainty, in the forefront of their minds.
Her brother’s body, a few floors beneath her feet, haunts her as she tucks her hands in her pockets. “I don’t understand what you are saying.”
Vision pauses, towering over her without looming. “Morality is a fragile concept, one I don’t fully understand. I won’t pass judgement but you should consider all consequences before making your final decision.”
Wanda straightens her shoulders beneath Vision’s painfully earnest gaze. “Are you going to tell on me?”
A flicker of a smile. “Of course not.”
There’s more and nothing at all to be said. “Thank you.”
She’s at the corner when Vision calls her name. “Mr. Stark will be here tomorrow at noon. Any decision should be made quickly.”
||
She cannot sleep. On her back or on her stomach, Wanda’s eyes flutter shut for all of two minutes before they’re wide open and staring into the dark. She can hear him, her brother, whispering in the foggy corners of her memory, his laughter bright in the pit of her stomach. He’s calling her from his electric tomb in the basement, shouting for her to dig him out.
Wanda tries to weigh the consequences without prejudice but every thought is colored with the blue of her brother’s eyes, ignited with life as if he’d never left. If she steals the soul gem, uses it to bring Pietro back to her, The Avengers will cast her out. The flimsy platform of trust she’s built will break away like ice. The camaraderie, the extensions of friendship will be severed at the elbow. But she won’t be alone. She’ll have Pietro and he’s all she’s ever needed.
Her decision’s made before she grabs her cell phone from the side table drawer. It’s nearly four a.m. but Clint will be awake. His nights are as restless as Sam’s, though it isn’t his dreams that haunt him, but the perilous question: What if? What if someone were to crawl through his children’s window, a blade brandished to their throats? What if he were to wake up in a pool of his wife’s blood?
Clint picks up, says, “If you’re thinking about running, don’t,” and Wanda collapses into herself. She buries her face in her pillow, soaking it with tears and spit, the cotton stifling her sobs. Her hand trembles around the phone and she can hear Clint shooting to his feet, running from the bedroom and into the hall, down the stairs as he says, “Wanda. Come on kid, breathe.”
She opens her mouth wider, tries to force the air inside, but her lungs are clenched tight. All the hope she’s buried beneath her ribcage, the light she’s swallowed and tucked away, is ripping her apart. Her brother, her Pietro —
“I’ve found a way,” she says. “I can bring him back.”
A gust of wind brushes against the speaker. “Don’t…” Clint bites his tongue, she can hear his teeth puncturing the muscle. “Tell me how.”
“It’s a miracle,” she says. “I can bring him back.”
An edge of warning, her name sharp in his throat. “Wanda, what did you — Don’t do anything — Don’t move until I get there.”
“Yes,” she says. “You can help me. We can —” Oh, it feels good to laugh. Joyous tremors ripple through her, the corners of her mouth turning up. Relief. Hope. Her brother. Her twin. “We can bring him back.” She laughs. “We can bring him back.”
||
Clint will try and stop her. She could hear it in his voice. She prayed for a miracle and he’ll snatch it away from her, for a reason she doesn’t care to know.
Thor’s guarding the chest in the basement, his rock solid form leaning against a long silver counter, arms crossed as he stares down at the box, daring it to move. He’s dressed in a way she’s never seen him — t-shirt and loose fitting jeans — a sight jarring enough to clench her fists.
Sam’s taught her to quiet her steps, to slow her breathing, to become a ghost in flesh and bone but Thor spots her. Expressionless, he moves closer to the chest, one hand on the lid. “They’ve all gone to bed,” he says, “why haven’t you?”
Wanda slinks into the room, her hand dragging along the wall. “I’m here to see my brother.”
Thor’s eyebrows knit in the middle. “Your brother? Is he not —”
“Yes,” she says. “But he’s here.” She points to the opposite side of the room, to the wall of cold chambers where her brother and a select few rest.
Thor says nothing as she opens Pietro’s chamber, third row, second from the bottom. Her hands tremble as her brother appears, safe beneath the glass of the pod. The bullets and their wounds, the dirt and sweat have been cleared away, leaving nothing but an expanse of skin, paled in death. Wanda hasn’t seen him since the night they locked him away and she’s almost forgotten about the faint smattering of freckles along his nose, pale pink in the winter, light brown in the sun. She itches to touch them, the trace the ridge of his brow, to feel him, to whisper in his ear, I am here. I am going to save you.
“Do you come down here often?” Thor says, eyes on the back of her head.
“No,” she admits. “I don’t want to see him like this.” But she must, if only for a few more moments.
How hazy her memory has become in six months. She remembers his hair being shorter, his collarbones not as sharp. She memorizes the width of him, the length of his arms, the scars on his knuckles. She doesn’t want to think it but, if something happens to her, if she’s stopped before she can wake him up, she wants her last vision of him to be accurate.
“Do you have a brother?” she says, twisting around.
Thor’s gaze hardens. “You were in my head. How is that you do not know the answer?”
She smiles tightly. “Your brother is dead?”
His nails scratch against the tabletop, fingers curling into fists. There’s a story there, one that spans volumes, but Wanda doesn’t care enough to know it. “Loki is…lost,” he says.
She isn’t willing to share her pain, not with an extraterrestrial stranger, a blond roadblock hunched in her way, but she can pretend. Wanda moves in close, arm cautiously outstretched — a frightened girl approaching a snarling dog — and touches his shoulder. Thor tenses, tightens his fist, but he doesn’t pull away.
Good.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she says. “The pain of losing someone so…precious to you…it’s…” Ineffable, deadly. An open wound that refuses to shut. Thor ducks his head and she moves her hand higher, grazing the back of his neck. “I can…” She tucks his hair behind his ear. “Let me help you.”
She’s too quick for him. Thor’s elbow jerks out, his arm readying to call his hammer but Wanda’s already inside of his head. She catches a glimpse of black, green, and gold. A whirlwind of color swimming in a sea of fire but she pushes past it. She’s not here to bewitch him, only grab hold of his consciousness and squeeze until his eyes roll back. Thor’s legs, his arms, his hands give out and he drops to the floor; out like a light.
She has twenty minutes, at most.
Wanda steps over his body, sliding on a thick glove to handle the gem. It’s wondrously small, a dazzling green that seems to spin in its cage. She grips it, the heat, it’s power, permeating her glove as a string of whispers dance around her head. Hundreds of voices speak to her in foreign tongues translated at the roof of her mouth.
“Help me,” she says. “Bring him back to me.”
The gem takes over and it’s almost liberating, her lack of control, as if she’s a spectator in her own body. Her feet move towards Pietro’s chamber, her fingers typing in the security code her brain does not know. The glass dissolves and she inches away from clammy flesh, begging to be touched.
She doesn’t. She can’t. It isn’t up to her.
The gem’s placed on his forehead, in the space between his brows. It burns his skin, sizzles and hisses, but she cannot lunge and snatch it off. She watches, helpless, as it digs and buries, settling deep inside his brain. His flesh swallows it up, closes around it like sealed lips. Then, a stillness. A calm that blankets the earth. An unbearable silence, an universal pause, shattered by a sharp intake of breath.
“Pietro?”
His eyes fly open, pupils wide, swallowing the blue until he blinks and, “I —” His shoulder drags him up from the pod, bending him forward as he hacks up a cough.
She still can’t move, cannot clap his back or touch the strands of hair curled at his neck. She can’t wrap her arms around him until he’s forced to shove her away. His head’s between his knees, shoulders trembling as he coughs and spits and — oh. The gem, pale green and wet, falls between his legs.
She’ll put it back later, now that she can move again. She has no more tears to shed but the sobs grow thick in her throat. She grabs her brother — her brother! — alive and breathing and warm against her chest. She measures the width of his back with his palms, the curve of his shoulders, the length of his hair.
“I…You…You’ve come back to me,” she says into his ear.
“Where —” Another cough. “Where did I go?”
Wanda laughs, open mouthed and hands on either side of her brother’s face. His color’s returned, cheeks swept with pink, eyes bright with light. “Nowhere,” she says, pressing her forehead to his. “You are here. With me.”
The near silence, once unbearable, is a comfort. She wants to remain in this limbo forever, their eyelashes brushing, Pietro’s breath moving steady through him.
“Wanda,” he says and there’s another laugh. She’ll never tire of hearing her name on his tongue.
“Yes?”
“I can’t…I can’t feel anything.”
She furrows her eyebrows, releases his head. Pietro lands on the chamber, a lump of dead weight save for the roll of his neck. “No,” she says, shaking her head. “No, you —” She grips his arm. “Can you feel this?” Pietro shakes his head. She raises the other one. “How about this?”
“No.”
She pokes his stomach, swats at his foot, grabs his knee, slaps his hand. Nothing. He can’t feel anything. “No,” she says, panic lining the back of her throat. “You were…You’re going to be fine…You were supposed…”
“It will take some time.” As if uncontrolled, the power inside of her surges to the palm of her hand, a mist of bright red winding around her wrist. Thor struggles to his feet, hammer tight in his fist, a scowl tugging at his mouth. “Your brother will not be well for some time.”
“But he will be able to feel again?”
“From what I have seen, yes.”
Pietro sighs. Wanda tosses him a smile — you are going to be okay — but she’s shaken out of it by Thor stomping forward, hammer outstretched towards them.
“You will not touch him,” she says, shielding her brother.
Thor swings his hammer, two quick loops kicking up gusts of recycled air. “Are you willing to die for what you have done?”
A small ball of neon fire hovers in her palm. “Wouldn’t you, if it was your brother?”
“This is all very dramatic,” Pietro says, “and I’m not saying I don’t appreciate it, but can someone explain what is going on?”
“You were dead,” Thor says. “Your sister gave you life.”
Pietro raises an eyebrow. “Please tell me you did not kiss me.”
“No,” Wanda says. “I used this.”
Her hand remains gloved but the gem is no longer as hot. There’s an undercurrent of warmth, a glow that returns with her touch. Pietro eyes the gem with knitted brows, as if it hadn’t clawed from his throat.
“Give it to me,” Thor says.
No. The gem speaks, a whisper of a hundred voices, latching onto her temples like a leech. You owe me, it says, burning the palm of her hand. One soul for another. I give and you take.
The gem reaches into her throat, a white smoke of fingers and nails, dragging out a response. “Or what?” she says.
“Please,” Pietro says, rolling his eyes. “Do not antagonize him.”
Or we’ll take back his soul. One soul for another. That’s our deal.
“Give it to me,” Thor says again, one foot in front of the other. “Or I will be forced to take it from you.”
Wanda meets Thor’s eyes. Her lips quiver as they form around the words, “What about him?”
No. He isn’t special enough.
“I will not harm your brother,” Thor says.
Wanda’s eyes drop to Thor’s feet, edging closer. She glances at the gem in her hand. “What do you mean?”
You and your brother are different. More than human. Unlike anyone we’ve seen. One soul for another. That’s our deal. One soul like yours. One soul like his.
“Do you not trust me?” Thor says.
Wanda swallows something thick. “How long do I have?”
“Less than two minutes,” Pietro says. “If he keeps up his current pace.”
Three months. One soul for another. One soul like yours. Or we’ll take his away.
“I am asking you nicely,” Thor says, holding out his hand. “Give me the soul gem…Or has it bewitched you?”
The gang of voices crawls back into the gem, silence swelling in the forefront of her mind. “No,” she says, closing her palm. “It has not. But I can’t give it back to you.”
“Why not?” Pietro says.
She looks at him. “I’ll tell you later.”
“You’ll tell us now,” Thor says, drawing up to his full height, a pillar of strength and rage. He wraps his hand around her neck, hard enough to pin her against the wall of cold chambers, light enough that she can breathe.
“Don’t touch her,” Pietro nearly screams but there’s nothing he can do. His body’s still betraying his mind, unmoving.
Thor ignores him, scowl and narrowed eyes focused on Wanda. She’s unafraid, meeting his gaze, gritting her teeth. “Are you going to kill me?”
His temper settles in a straight line of his mouth. His hand drops from Wanda’s neck. They’re close enough that she senses his regret, his lack of control, twisting in the base of his skull. “Did the gem speak to you?” Thor says.
Instinctually, a lie scratches against her teeth but she swallows it. “Yes.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. “Tell me what it said.”
Wanda’s eyes flicker to her brother, watching her with knitted brows and flushed cheeks — compromised and tight with rage. She reaches for his hand, thumb against his wrist, counting the beats of life thrumming in his pulse point. “It wants another soul,” she says. “Someone like me and my brother or…”
“Or it will take me away from you,” Pietro says.
Wanda nods, hand tightening around the gem. “You can’t take this away from me,” she says to Thor. “I won’t let him go again.”
Thor watches the pair of them: Pietro’s hand limp in Wanda’s grip, her thigh pressed against the chamber. As close as they can be without Wanda climbing beside him. There’s no sense in peering inside of his mind. The memory of his brother flickers heavily across his face, softening stiff shoulders, loosening the muscles in his arms. He drops the hammer, pinches the bridge of his nose. “What would you have me do?”
“Clint will be here soon,” Wanda says. “Let us talk to him.”
“We’ll take talk to him together,” Thor says. “For now…” He grabs the silver chest, holds it open in front of her. “I’m not taking it away from you,” he says. “But it needs to remain in here.”
How long Wanda stands with her chin high and back rigidly straight, turned away from the open chest, she doesn’t know. It’s Pietro and his long, exasperated sigh that snaps her pride, her fear, and leads the gem into its temporary home. A cacophony of whispers wrap around the chest, quieting at the close.
Thor tucks it beneath his arm, turns away from the pair of them.
“So,” Pietro says, clearing his throat. “How did I die?”
||
Thor carries Pietro over his shoulder, a sack of blood and bones carried up to Wanda’s room. The first blink of morning streams through her window, painting her twin bed in a golden hue. Thor rolls Pietro on his back, limbs straightened out, hair splayed on her pillow.
Wanda curls beside him, face buried in the crook of his neck. Not much has changed, not the smell or feel of him, not the warmth of his breath on the top of her head. Nothing but the silence of his skin and the stillness of his heart, beating in time with hers.
Thor leaves them to wait for Clint, the chest tucked beneath his arm. “How soon before they kick you out?” Pietro says.
Wanda smiles. “Don’t worry. We will have a place to go.” Clint will ensure it.
As they wait she fills his mind with lazy memories of the Barton’s and their comfortable farm, of weekends spent shouldering two children on her lap as they steer a rumbling tractor, of warm grass tickling the backs of her knees, of ice pops sticking webs of red and orange between her fingers.
“I’m glad,” Pietro says into her hair, “that you were not alone.”
“You’re wrong,” she says.
“And you are stubborn.” Pietro’s words slur towards the end.
“Are you alright?”
“I’m fine,” he says, blinking. “Everything’s so…”
“Slow?”
“Yes. Is this how you always feel? Half-drunk?”
“No. For most of us, this is normal.”
Pietro groans. “If I never get better, please, do not hesitate to shoot me in the head.”
||
Pietro doesn’t remember the moments before his death, the finger-snap of a decision that severed Wanda in two, but he remembers Clint. The memory receptors of her brother’s mind light up when he walks into the room, Thor close behind him, the chest nowhere in sight.
“I’ve left it with Vision,” he says, closing Wanda’s bedroom door.
She isn’t sure what to expect from the man who owes her brother his life. Clint hovers near the doorway, near Thor, staring down at the pair of them as if he’s forgotten Wanda’s from a set. A twin whose hobbled gracelessly from the loss of her other half, complete yet again. He meets Wanda’s eyes, shifts uncomfortably — one foot, then the other — before he says, “Thor tells me I can run circles around you now.”
A smile tugs at the corner of Pietro’s mouth. “You have a strange way of thanking me for saving your life.”
“I’ve always been a bit unorthodox.” The knots in Clint’s shoulders visibly loosen. He moves to the opposite side of the room, sliding into the small space at the foot of the bed, where a nearly empty dresser is pushed against the wall. Arms crossed, one ankle over the other, he smirks at them with the same tilt to his mouth, reserved for his kids. “What am I going to do with you?” he says, looking at Wanda.
“You’re going to help us,” she says, lips moving against her brother’s t-shirt.
“Oh am I?”
“Yes.” Wanda pushes herself up, back against the metal headboard. “The gem…It needs another soul or it will take Pietro’s away.”
Clint’s eyes narrow. “So you’re asking me to murder someone? Or are you asking for my blessing to commit a murder?”
“No.”
“Because that’s what it is, you know that right? That’s what this thing — Wait. Did it…Did it talk to you?”
Wanda nods. “It needs a very particular soul. One that is enhanced like ours.”
“Are there others like you?” Thor says.
The twins share a glance. She hasn’t forgotten the ease of conversation that flows freely between them, a sentence constructed without words. Wanda can see into her brother’s head but she doesn’t need to, to understand the widening of his eyes, the skepticism written on his mouth. They deserve to know, she says, in the curve of his shoulders.
“There is one other person,” Pietro says.
Clint straightens up, eyes sharp as he says, “Who?”
“Our father,” says Wanda.
“I thought —”
“Our stepfather is dead,” she says. “Our father abandoned our mother to pursue a murderous rampage. From what we know of him, he’s not a good man and it may be murder but —” Wanda touches her brother’s hand. Pietro smiles at her and she feels a hint of movement in his fingers. Faint, but there. A smile breaks across her mouth.
“I need to talk to you,” Clint says, glancing at Wanda as he turns towards the door. “Outside.”
No. She wants to stay with her brother, to map the length of his fingertips until the nerves set fire to his palm. She wants to be the person he touches when the control returns to his body, but she must go. As much as Clint owes her brother for shielding him with his life, she owes Clint equally for granting her a home.
The living quarters are nearly empty, this time of morning. Sam’s out with Steve, Vision’s wandering the grounds, Natasha — She isn’t sure Natasha or Rhodey know the meaning of sleep.
Clint never makes her feel small, even when he refuses to shield the look of disappointment tugging at his features. “I told you to wait for me,” he says through clenched teeth.
“Tony’s coming. I could not afford to wait.”
A sigh, a heavy hand rushes over his face. “What do you — What do you think is going to happen when the rest of them find out what you did?”
“I don’t know,” Wanda says, “and I don’t care. You know I wanted nothing but my brother back — ”
“And now he’s here. Congratulations, really. But I don’t — You aren’t grasping the severity of what you’ve done.” There’s a hint of red crawling up the back of his neck. Exasperation mixed with anger.
Wanda clenches her fists. “I understand what I did may be considered wrong.” Clint laughs, loud and humorless. She raises her voice. “But I would do it again. We will leave if we have to.”
“If you have to?” Clint says. “This is — This is what I mean about your lack of comprehension. Once Tony gets his hands on that thing? You’re not going anywhere with it.”
“Why?”
“What…What do you mean why?”
“Why does Tony Stark get the last word?” she says, a pinch of hysteria gripping her throat. “As if he isn’t to blame for my brother’s death. As if I won’t kill him for trying to stop me.”
Clint grabs her arm and maneuvers her to the corner. “Stop it.”
“Help us,” she says. “We have to run but Pietro can’t move, not yet. We need a place to hide until he can and we find our father.”
“Wanda —”
“You have another safe house. Laura told me about it. Please,” she says, voice breaking. “We need to do this. I can’t lose him again.”
A stifling silence stretches between them, punctured only by the sounds of routine, flaring to life on the floors above. Coffee’s brewing in the break room, the tech crew’s arriving for their early shifts. In less than an hour Sam will be back, dripping sweat as Steve claps his shoulder, an inside joke passing between them.
“Please,” Wanda says, “I don’t know who else I can ask.”
She sees the moment Clint breaks, the collapse of his hardened features, the softening of his hand on her arm. He tosses a look over his shoulder, surveying the empty hall before, “You can’t do this with just me.”
“We’ll be fine.”
“No,” Clint says. “You won’t be. I’ll help you on one condition: We have to tell Steve.”
||
“How could you let this happen?” Steve’s voice grows impressively loud in the small confines of Wanda’s bedroom. There isn’t nearly enough space for five of them but they make the best of it. It’s what they’ve been trained to do.
“She toyed with my mind,” Thor says. “When I woke up he was alive.”
Pietro flicks his wrist, a half-hearted wave in Steve’s direction. He cannot lift his arm, but his fingers can extend and bend, thumbs curling into themselves.
Steve’s climbed the hurdle of shock, welcomed Pietro back to the land of the living before settling on his discontent. “And you think this is a good idea?” he says to Clint.
“I didn’t say anything about it being good,” Clint says. “But it’s the only option we have.”
Wanda’s jaw instinctually tightens when Steve’s eyes rove over her, words like firecrackers in his mind. They have one other option but he won’t say it, not while he’s in her room. “If we do this you’ll have to leave now,” he says. “I can cover for Thor, say he had to take the gem back to Asgard but for you two…” He looks between Wanda and Pietro.
“You can tell them I’ve run away,” Wanda says.
“And when they ask about your brother?”
“They won’t.”
The hard lines carved in Steve’s face soften a fraction. “They will,” he says. “But I’ll figure something out. Clint, call me as soon as you land at the safe house. Thor? That gem never leaves your sight.” He turns to the twins. “Come back. The both of you. Or I’ll tell Fury and trust me, you don’t want him hunting you down.”
||
The four of them are heading west, spread out in a plane cloaked from all tracking devices, an invisible metal bird chewing through the clouds. There’s no music, no sound aside from the occasional foot on the floor — Clint or Thor maneuvering from end of the plane to the other, a polite glance thrown her way.
There’s nothing left to be said. Clint’s disappointed but understands. Thor’s angry, at himself, at Wanda, for allowing her inside of his head yet again. But they too share a common ground, an understanding that kept him from wringing her neck. If he could’ve saved his brother, ten times over, he would have.
Four hours in, Pietro can move his right arm. Laying on a metal bench, he swats at Clint’s leg as he passes by, tugs on the edge of Thor’s cape, says, “You are a little overdressed, don’t you think?”
Wanda joins him, curled on the floor, her head near his own; a chaotic mix of silver and brown strands tangling together. Pietro reaches for her hand and their palms collide, forefinger, middle, pinky, thumb, slotting into their rightful home.
“You would’ve been okay,” Pietro says, “without me.”
“Maybe,” Wanda says. “But where is the fun in that?”