Chapter Text
"Looking up from underneath
Fractured moonlight on the sea
Reflections still look the same to me
As before I went under
And it's peaceful in the deep
Cathedral where you cannot breathe
No need to pray, no need to speak
Now I am under all
And it's breaking over me
A thousand miles down to the sea bed
Found the place to rest my head
Never let me go
Never let me go
Never let me go
Never let me go"
-Never Let me Go, Florence and the Machine
*
Wanda could hardly remember when the mark began to appear.
It was small and barely noticeable, the faint outline of a flower etched into the skin on the inside of her pointer finger, like a tattoo. Circling the flower and running around her finger were the words “I know you're standing there. I can hear you." She vaguely remembered her hands itching and tingling for weeks when she was child before it fully manifested, but her childhood was so hazy that she wasn’t really sure how old she had been. What she did remember was that her father had taken her small hand in his warm weathered ones and observed the mark with curiosity and thoughtfulness. His eyes had crinkled at the corners when he looked up at her and smiled, her palm still cradled in his.
"This is your soul mark, little bear,” he had said in a gentle voice. “When you find the person you are meant to be with, they will know you are their soulmate because of your mark. The dreams will begin soon, but you shouldn’t be afraid. Everyone gets them. Even I did.”
She was terrified when she went to bed that night. Her mind raced with questions as she lay there in the dark: Who is my soulmate? Where are they from? Are they even born yet? What if I don’t have any dreams?
Pietro could feel her restlessness as he lay in his bed across the room, and only his soft, whispered reassurances soothed her mind enough for her to sleep. Her first dream of her soulmate was blurry and confusing, but a few sensations stood out to her clearly. As she slid into her dream, the first thing Wanda felt was pain. Her side ached viciously as if she had been kicked repeatedly in the ribs and her cheek was pressed to something cold and unyielding, like metal. The feeling suddenly slipped away to reveal a rapid succession of flashing images and sensations: a lock of red hair curling to the ground, a swirl of fabric, a girl spinning swiftly in pointe shoes, the distinct smell of smoke and the sound of feet shuffling across the ground, and then silence. The last thing Wanda saw before she woke up was flames painted across the sky, twisting and turning in the wind.
The dreams left her feeling more confused than anything but she kept having them at least once a month for the entirety of her childhood. The images were always different and seemed to follow the growth and life of her soulmate, if not extremely vaguely and spottily. The only thing that was consistent was the occasional fleeting image of the same flower that was engraved in her own skin.
*
Wanda absently twisted the ring on her pointer finger as she sat outside the operating room, waiting to hear if her brother was going to die.
Exhaustion crept through her bones and threatened to cripple her, but she pushed it down. She needed to stay awake and alert for Pietro. As she sat, her mind drifted back to earlier that day.
She had fought with the Avengers to defeat the same evil that she had helped to bring to the world and she had succeeded on that front, but so many people hadn’t survived. Her throat clenched as she thought about those she couldn’t save, the people from her own country that she had helped sentence to death. In retrospect, she couldn’t believe what she was thinking; joining with Ultron and helping him destroy the Avengers. But when she put herself back in her shoes at the time, she understood why she made the choices she did.
They had been angry. Angry at Stark, angry at the people who had thrown the explosives that took their parents away, angry at themselves for not being able to do more to avenge their family. They had nothing and were nothing for so long, another pair of orphans in a world full of hardships and struggles, but then suddenly they had something. These powers, whatever they were and however they came to be, were a new chance for her and her brother. A chance to prove themselves, a chance to be as strong as they wished they were when their parents died, and a chance to hit back just as hard as they had been hit, or even harder.
And they almost achieved their goal. They had almost destroyed the Avengers, worked their way inside and torn the team apart by the seams, ripping their darkest memories from the depths of their minds and forcing them towards the light. Wanda thinks she could have killed them all, if she had really wanted to, but even contemplating it now just made her feel sick.
She had battled alongside these people, these superheroes, and exposed a side of herself that she didn’t even think she had. For the first time in a long time, Wanda was hesitantly optimistic about her future. They might even have a place with the team, her and Pietro, when he woke up.
If he woke up.
Wanda dug the heels of her hands into her eyes with frustration, gritting her teeth. She couldn’t think like that. Pietro was going to be fine, and he would heal and then get up and make corny jokes and be infuriatingly optimistic and run faster than he ever had before. He would be fine, she repeated to herself. It became her mantra for several minutes, the only thing keeping her from breaking down entirely. He would be fine, he would be fine, he would be-
But she couldn’t help remembering how she felt when he got shot. The pain that jolted through her that must have been ten times worse in him, the pain that felt like her heart was being ripped to shreds, the pain that drowned her and forced her down, down, down further into the darkness that constantly threatened to overcome her.
Pietro was the light. The blinding, brilliant light that kept her from losing hope all those years. Her twin, whom she felt responsible for even though he was older, whom she had let run off and be a hero to the point where he had almost gotten killed, her twin who was lying on a hospital bed right now with tubes piercing his arms and doctors cutting into him and skin so pale he looked like he would float up out of his body and disappear and -
“Hey,” said a soft voice from above her, breaking her out of her thoughts.
Her gaze snapped up to find Captain Ameri – Steve – as he had asked her to call him, standing above her, still fully dressed in his suit. His face was smeared with dirt and blood and his hair was slicked through with sweat and grime, but he searched her face gently with concern in his eyes. Pietro had the same blue eyes, she found herself thinking. Has. He has the same blue eyes. She clenched her jaw tightly as her thoughts drifted back to Pietro, so vulnerable on the operation table, and looked up to find Steve still staring at her, concern visible in his features.
“May I sit?” he asked, gesturing to the chair next to her.
She hesitated, but then nodded, and he joined her in silence for a few minutes. Wanda had wanted to be as close to Pietro as possible during his surgeries, so she had chosen the chairs that were up against the wall of the operation room, and she was comforted by the fact that she could feel his presence through the walls. Steve was also a comforting presence, a warm solid mass of person who appeared to genuinely care about her, but he still made her slightly uncomfortable and she wasn’t sure if she made him feel the same way. If she did, it was justified. She had messed with his head, torn apart his dreams and made them nightmares. That would make any person hostile.
It had certainly made the Black Widow stay away. After their first and only interaction when Wanda has slipped inside her head and tugged hard until the memories of the Red Room broke free, they had not had any more reason to talk. They had fought on opposite sides of the city, and even now, after the fight was over, she hadn’t seen Natasha at all. Avengers Tower was a big place and it seemed relatively easy to avoid everyone if you wanted to be alone, and the second they returned Natasha vanished.
Wanda truly felt bad about what she had done and she wanted the opportunity to apologize to Natasha, especially because the memories she had exposed were raw and had been buried deeper than those of the other Avengers, but she definitely did not think that the Black Widow would appreciate her apology.
She sighed in frustration and knotted her fingers together, subconsciously twisting her ring around and around, and the edges of the metal bit into the skin of her soulmate mark. Steve’s gaze drifted to her hands and she could feel his eyes focus on the ring’s unusually wide band. She was grateful that he didn’t ask about it, but instead turned his gaze back to the wall in front of him and sat there in silence. She was unnerved by his ability to sit completely still but grateful for his calm strength at the same time.
Time passed and she sank deeper and deeper into her thoughts. She couldn’t tell exactly how many hours had gone by since she found herself on this chair outside the operating room, but it was long enough that her limbs were beginning to numb. She sensed a movement to her left as Steve started to open his mouth as if to ask a question, but before he got one word out a frantic beeping sound began to emanate from the adjacent room. Without even realizing she had moved Wanda was on her feet, all her senses on high alert, and Steve leaped up not long after her.
Wanda all but flew around the corner and burst through the double doors into operating room. What she saw made her mouth go dry and her magic pulse erratically in her veins: Pietro was lying shirtless on the table with half of his chest and abdomen cut open, convulsing so violently that she could see even his pale eyelids trembling.