Work Text:
“Pain only makes you stronger,” Natasha whispers, staring out at the flat expanse of water. The wind tugs her hair, bright like blood, streaming behind her. Wanda watches. She is quiet.
Natasha is not really speaking to her at all. But Wanda is listening. She is learning how to listen.
--
Wanda skips down the street. Her legs are short, but a touch longer than Pietro’s. War has not yet invaded her city, her country, her home. She races around corners, weaves through crowds, dashes around vendors. Behind her, Pietro calls out distractions, diversions. He fights dirty, gaining slight ground.
Wanda only laughs – she runs on.
---
Magic is this – the endless horizon, the stars above, the constellations and the stories pinned to them, the mighty endurance of the mountains, the golden morning light, the existence of gods and aliens, friendship, belonging, teamwork, love. Magic is this – races in midair, flying flying flying, thoughts and fears and desires shimmering on the surface, bloodred scarlet (paired with shining gold, or pristine white and vibrant blue, or twilight black hourglasses), vicious strokes weaving through the air, heroics.
Magic is this – Wanda Maximoff and the place she has chiseled out for herself. The worth she pins to her own chest. The value of her existence.
---
The gulls caw in the wind. Their flight appears effortless until the wind blows. Stubbornness is carved into their bones, their DNA. They fight, fight, fight.
Wanda wonders if giving up wouldn’t leave them just a little better off.
---
Their Halloween costumes are carefully arranged on the bed and Wanda’s hands did not put them there. When she was nine – the last Halloween, the last one – Mama had dressed her and Pietro up as a skeleton and his executioner. Da had lectured them on the name of each bone in the anatomically correct costume. Wanda had been handed a tacky, cardboard axe – this was a war ground, now, and no one needed any extra target painted on their back.
A decade later, Wilson had left a costume at her door and she had spent the day curled in a ball in her bed.
Now, another decade later, Wanda’s brother has been returned to her like a neatly wrapped gift. Just in time for Halloween. In time, in time, in time.
“Wanda,” Vision snags her by the wrist, and she pauses her descent of the stairs. “Don’t you think your brother looks a bit... different?”
“People change,” Wanda shrugs, her fingers dancing over the golden glow of his forehead.
“Yes,” he says, staring into her eyes. “They do.”
---
“Sometimes, you can’t save everybody,” the Captain says, his shoulder hunching in on themselves. His lips play out in a sorrowful smile. Wanda doesn’t know if the sharp sting of guilt, of regret, and always always always of grief, is his or her own.
Sitting on this bed, side by side, they are the both of them the same.
---
She looks in the mirror. Hair, bright like blood. Wanda Maximoff is an open wound.
---
In school, the teachers with their mugs of herbal tea and spectacles and fingers dusted with chalk, rewrite their lesson plans. They teach these classes of disappearing children how to stay silent and still and small for hours upon hours (for forever, maybe). They teach the difference between quiet and silent (the difference between life and death). They teach these sweet, baby-faced children when to run, when to scream, and when to hide. There is smoke in the air and a loaded gun next to the World’s Best Teacher mug.
Wanda and Pietro carry these lessons on their thin shoulders for the rest of their lives.
---
“If you walk out that door, you are an Avenger,” says Clint Barton. He is a man that has grown used to offering up hope to scared little dancing killers.
The city is coming down around them. But this has been a long time coming. No Sokovian is a stranger to smoke on the horizon, in the air. These streets have long since been littered with the carnage explosions leave behind.
Wanda rises. She walks out that door. She has a shit ton to avenge.
---
Wanda leads Pietro down dingy alleys and backstreets, in between two stamping horses, around a procession of circus trucks, and through a thicket of tourists. She runs, races, flies. Home is within sight. Through the door, up the five flights of stairs, palms pressed to the front door in a display of victory. Wanda is not running away – she is running towards .
---
Sitting on this bed, they call Wanda a killer.
---
Scarlet tendrils shift Sam out of the way on the race track. “Dude!” He exclaims, as Wanda zips towards the finish line. It’s Vision’s hand that encloses around her ankle, pulls her back, keeps her steady. When they land – Sam and Rhodes bickering already – Wanda laughs until she feels physically sick.
---
The Darkhold is a disease, smudging Wanda’s fingertips with ash. Her hair burns, burns, burns. Her fingertips all burnt out. She is the fire, the explosion, the carnage, the aftermath. All at once. So much for one body. The Darkhold infects her systematically. Methodically.
It leaves her love behind. Wanda has always been defined by that, by her love, by her loss. She looks in the mirror – burning, flaming, bleeding – and she recognises herself. Diagnosis received. Untouched.
It leaves her love behind – it leaves her grief.
---
They eat chocolate cake for Pietro and Wanda’s tenth birthday. Mama takes lots and lots of pictures. Da carts them around on his broad back and claims he is getting too old for this.
Wanda smiles and smiles and smiles. Her face splits open with it. “One year older,” Mama exclaims, pressing a kiss to Wanda’s freckled cheek. “My baby girl.”
The light in the kitchen is golden and warm. The windows are permanently blacked out. Pietro is reciting jokes from his new joke book. Wanda is glowing.
---
It is Wanda that led them to the skull. It is Wanda that chose to avenge. It is Wanda, always, that leads. Pietro follows her through backstreets, to Hydra’s volunteer desk, and finally into the battlefield. He does not follow her back out.
The skeleton and his executioner indeed.
---
The newspapers have labelled the day the sky fell as ‘The Battle of Sokovia’ (as though Sokovia has not been battling for a decade and a half, as though it hasn’t always been a war ground). They speak of it with a disgusting sort of hunger. This world swallows you whole.
Barton leans against the doorframe of the room Wanda has not left, and then he says “come on, kid,” and leads her to his truck.
He sings country songs as the city buildings are replaced by lush green fields. The air is not filled with smoke here. The dirt driveway is long and winding. Barton parks the truck and walks up the garden path without a second glance. Wanda hesitates, then scrambles out and follows him.
“Did you bring Auntie Nat?” a young, high voice asks.
“Auntie Nat’s working ,” Barton complains. “But this is Wanda, and I’ll tell you a secret,” the little girl, who is hanging off Barton’s shoulders, leans closer, “she’s pretty cool.”
Later, Wanda will be shown to the guest room and introduced to the heavily pregnant Laura Barton, handed a potato peeler and expected to help. After that, the stars will come out, clearer than she’s ever seen them, city girl that she is. And much later, Laura will go into labour and Wanda will be sent back to the Compound.
For now, though, little Lila Barton peers up at her with delight and demands she push her on the swings. Her big brother dashes for the swing set and the little girl screeches, runs for him. A unit. A partnership. A brother and a sister, running, racing, flying.
Instead of crying, Wanda smiles.
---
They wait for three days under that bed. The air stinks of dust and cloying smoke and rotting flesh. The twins learn, for the first time, what true loathing feels like.
Ten years old, and revenge struck into the marrow of their bones.
Wanda falls asleep clutching Pietro’s hand, his fingernails digging into her skin.
He is her lifeline, always.
---
How unfair . Not even this hell bound book of leeching darkness takes away the splitting pain of everything that makes up Wanda.
---
"My holčička," Babička says. Her bones are old and thin, and Wanda finds herself wondering if they would be hollow, should she snap them. Babička is not bird like, not sprightly enough to fly away, but she has a look in her eye, like maybe she could've, once. Mama used to say she was still alive by sheer force of will, but she said it proudly.
That will be you one day, she'd told her children. You are stubborn. You belong in this world, even when everyone is telling you that you do not. You are my children, darlings, and you are children of Sokovia. That means something, yes?
Yes, Mama, Wanda thinks now. Yes. My life means something. It means everything. It has to.
When Babička hugs her, it's fragile and tentative. Babička's bones are hollow, maybe, and Wanda ran away from her house when she and Pietro turned eighteen. You protect each other, Mama had instructed sternly, and then Babička in her place. You will protect, yes? That is your duty to each other.
But Wanda hadn't protected Pietro. Hadn't been able to in the one moment it counted.
"I couldn't save Pietro," she mumbles into Babička's shoulder. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, Babička. I didn't save him."
"None of that, holčička," Babička demands. Her accent is thicker, heavier, harsher than Wanda's. "I will miss that foolish boy greatly. But I will not have to miss this foolish girl, hm? You have saved yourself, yes? A great thing, that is. I am so proud of you, my holčička. So, so proud. You understand this, yes?"
Wanda doesn't know when she starts crying, but Babička doesn't let go. She holds Wanda together with her pencil thin arms, and Wanda weeps with all her sorrow.
"My foolish child is with my Mama now, holčička. She will take care of him, as will my daughter. You know this. You know he is with the stars, yes? Find him in the stars, my Wanda."
"I miss him, Babička," Wanda manages to get out through her tears. "I miss Pietro."
"Oh, as he misses you, child. When your time is right, you will be with your brother again, just as I will be with my daughter. We only have to collect stories to tell them, hm? That is your burden now, my Wanda. You must live before you die."
---
Wanda has never loved anyone as much as she loves the boys, her boys. Tommy and Billy. Billy and Tommy. The red light is getting close, and then closer, and closer. They are holding hands across their beds. Lifelines.
“Thank you for choosing me to be your mom,” Wanda says, lingering at the doorway. She had always wished for one last goodbye – with Pietro, with Mama, with Da, with Viz, with Natasha. She had never anticipated how much she would abhor it.
Wanda loves those two boys with every single particle of her body, every iota of magic she possesses, with all that she is and has been and could ever be.
How could a measly string of spoken words ever convey that?
---
They put her in a cell.
Wanda is a killer, and they lock up killers. But Wanda is also a girl, a girl that saved her friend, her captain, a girl that stopped the explosion in the middle of the crowded marketplace. She is put in a straitjacket for the crime of being incapable of stopping the bomb from going off at all. She is put in a straitjacket for the crime of the magic they forced under her skin.
She is put in a straitjacket for having too much power, or not enough. Wanda doesn’t know anymore.
---
“Pietro,” Wanda says. She has snuck out of her room and into her brother’s. She can never sleep on her own anymore. “Aren’t you angry?”
“Stark is still living in his fancy city tower, you know,” he whispers, because he knows without asking what she means. Wanda’s rage is reflected singularly in Pietro. She only has to look to him to find herself. “He still lives in his home. He is a rich white man in America. He wields the blade of his genius recklessly. With abandon. I would like to gut him.”
“Then let’s gut him,” Wanda says, her mouth stretched into a grin. She is cobbled together only of gaping holes and animalistic fury.
Pietro scoffs. “We’re two weak orphan refugees, and men like Tony Stark are untouchable. Be realistic, Wanda.”
“Yes,” she nods, reaching out to grip his hand in the dark, because she is not quixotic. “But what if we weren’t? Pietro, what if we weren’t?”
---
She stands on Da’s feet and he holds her waist, touch featherlight. Wanda is seven years old and learning how to dance. Mama plays the violin, a stream of slow, hopeful sounds, and Pietro is hula hooping on the couch.
They waltz through the small apartment, picking up the pace and the tempo until Da is spinning her around and around and around. Wanda giggles in pure delight. Outside, the sky is bright and clear and free of smoke.
---
Dishes dance across the table. Socks knit themselves in the air. The recipe for Agnes’ best lemon cake sits on the counter. The house smells like lavender. Tommy and Billy are playing cards on the carpet. Soon, Viz will be home from work and the sun will turn everything golden. The stone will. Wanda has built this house, this life, from nothing.
She is the composer, the actress, the director, the script writer. Wanda has written herself into happiness. She does not think about the shadows that lurk in the past.
---
Pietro is a boy overflowing with hate. He allows himself to be shaped into a weapon for them to aim. He does not have desires, wishes, dreams. He has (had) only revenge. Payback. An eye for an eye (makes the whole world go blind).
There isn’t a future this boy was robbed of. He runs runs runs, but sometimes the bullet has to catch up to you. Some things can’t be outrun forever.
Wanda has no photos of the boy that turned into this sharpened tool, but she remembers remembers remembers . She cries for the brave, bold runner who loved her with everything he had in him. She cries for the good-hearted, round faced, rosy child that he had grown from. The one that had plans, dreams, desires and wishes. The one that appeared, ghostlike, to propel the body like a shield.
There was Barton – a hero, a friend, a father – and in his arms, another round faced Sokovian boy who dreamt. Wanda’s brother had died good hearted. The children inside us never really die at all.
---
She has to believe that Vision did not know. She has to.
---
Natasha teaches her dialect, smoothing over the lingering traces of Sokovian in her speech. Wanda, still and always a relocated refugee, has lost her culture and her traditions, her language and her cuisine.
She gives this up too.
---
They had to pull Wanda off her brother. Off the corpse.
---
Magic is this – pain.
---
“We can go home,” says the Captain’s girl, but Wanda knows like Steve knows.
There is no home to return to. And the war is never over.
---
“You could have saved us,” Steve rasps, and Wanda thinks yes, I could have . She thinks I am sorry, Mama, Da. I am so sorry, Pietro.
---
“We are all dead. Can you not see?”
Prophets and fortune tellers.
They are all dead, all 50% of them.
---
“ You’ll break them.”
“Only the breakable ones.”
There had been other volunteers. Ones without the protection of rage in their veins. Wanda and Pietro had been told to bury the bodies.
The stench had lingered for days.
Some days, Wanda thinks she can still smell it on her skin.
---
“ I have no place in the world.”
I have no place in the world.
I have no-
I have no place in the world.
I have no place in the world.
I have no place in the world.
I have-
I have-
---
The Evolution of the Dream, Mr. Jovanović writes on the blackboard. The stark white lines of the chalk. “That’s what we are, aren’t we?” he says.
He turns. His glasses are shattered and there is a bullet hole in his head. Right in the middle of his forehead (where there should be a golden stone). Wanda flinches back, away.
(Mr. Jovanović was shot for insubordination.)
The blood drips down his long nose, into the lens of his tortoiseshell glasses. “Cat got your tongue, Wanda?”
“I-” She is speechless, her words taken away with her joy. “ What? How are you here?”
“Miss Maximoff,” Mr. Jovanović smiles, “you should know by now that I’m not really here at all.”
---
“Pain only makes you stronger,” Natasha says, and she turns away from the flat grey bay. Clouds have floated over the sun and the wind has picked up. “Don’t you understand, Wanda? Don’t you understand? It’s the pain. ”
“No,” Wanda whimpers, just a scared little girl under the bed, always that terrified little girl, holding her breath. “I don’t understand, Nat, explain it to me. I don’t understand. I don’t understand .”
Natasha opens her mouth, and-
---
Her boys are in trouble - she can hear them screaming, in the dark recesses of her mind. It is one girl for two younger, more fragile, more missed, more loved boys.
We don't trade lives, Steve tries to tell her, tall and self-righteous. But Wanda sweeps him away. She blew a hole through the head of the man she loved and it meant nothing. They did trade lives, in the end. Sometimes, there was no other choice.
Her scarlet magic shoots through the air, sharpened like knives, precise and deadly, and Wanda is going to win. Her boys are in reach. America Chavez - lost and loveless - for Billy and Tommy Maximoff, so missed, so close to found. The thoughts are bitter and selfish and brought out of the shadows by the Darkhold, but Wanda doesn't know that yet.
"Mom!" Tommy screams, terrified.
"I'm coming, baby, just hold on," Wanda says.
"Mom!" Billy gasps out, breathless like they never left that street, like Agatha never stopped strangling him.
"Wanda!" Vision screams, except that's not right. In every iteration of that day, Viz had never been anything less than grateful.
She forces her eyes open just as the three bodies slump to the ground, lifeless.
"No," she whispers, and then screams it. "No! This isn't how it happened, stop it, no, it didn't go like this!"
"Oh, Wanda," says the girl, and she looks like Mama and Natasha and Agnes, flickering between the three women Wanda has loved. "What have you done?"
---
“Is Wanda Maximoff really dead?” Asks a boy that Wanda doesn’t know, and she screams, wails, a banshee cry that rips apart the peaceful walk of this boy. She pounds on the air around her, but it is not hers to breathe.
---
Pietro, six years old and so innocent, so achingly familiar. Wanda has blood dried on her face, but that has never bothered her brother. She expects him to say "you are becoming a slob, Wanda," or "and you say I need to shower more," or hand her a washcloth.
He points a finger at her, shaking, and begins to scream.
"No," Wanda whispers, straightening up, away from her brother.
---
“My baby girl,” says Mama, holding her violin, looking ethereal in the light.
“Mama! You have to go, you have to get out of here- there's a bomb, or there’s going to be-”
Wanda’s warnings go unheard, unheeded. “One year older. Can you do one more, baby girl? Just one more. That’s all I’m asking. One year at a time.” She carefully places her violin to the side, smooths down Wanda’s hair, presses a kiss to her forehead.
“Just one more,” Mama pleads.
---
“I went home,” Rogers says. He is sitting in an old dance hall that isn’t Wanda’s, isn't Sokovia's, isn't familiar. Across the room, Peggy Carter is dancing with Rogers himself.
It occurs to Wanda that she’s never seen him look so happy as he does across the room.
This Steve stands up suddenly, holds his hand out to her, and then they are waltzing out of time to the music. “I went home, Wanda,” he whispers. “I found home and I fought my way back to it. Now it’s your turn. Go home. Go home, Wanda.”
---
The seagulls keep right on fighting against the wind.
---
Mr. Jovanović pushes his glasses up his nose, the blood leaking out of them. His skin is chalk white with death. He taps the blackboard. “The Evolution of the Dream, Wanda. It’s always the evolution of the dream. Do you understand? Do you understand?”
---
“Pain only makes you stronger,” Natasha clasps her hand – a lifeline, maybe. “And you’re so strong, Wanda. You’ve always been so strong, and now you’re stronger than ever. Do you get it now?”
---
“You must live, child,” Babička says. “Understand? You owe them something. You owe them everything. Gather your stories and your breaths and live, holčička.”
---
Mr. Jovanović says “it’s always you that’s behind it. It’s always a dream.”
“So none of this is real?”
“Or all of it,” he says, smiling as the blood reaches his purple tie. “You decide your truths, Miss Maximoff.”
---
Agnes is bright and lively and smiling and Wanda hates her so much she could spit. “Oh, hon,” she simpers. “You have got yourself in a pickle.”
---
“She’s not my mom,” says the boy, and oh, oh, oh, that is Billy, who she birthed, who she bathed, who she cradled and hugged and loved and loves still, even now.
He is another woman’s son too. Wanda can see it shining on his skin. In his unfamiliar face. But she vows, then, that she will learn this new-old boy inside out.
---
"I'm not a monster, I'm a mother," says Agatha Harkness, and Wanda slaps her across the face.
---
It's different. Natasha and Stark and Vis offering up themselves and Wanda offering America Chavez. She wants to get down on her knees and apologise, but America Chavez is nowhere to be found.
---
"I can't feel you."
---
Family is forever.
Isn't it?
---
“Did you bring Auntie Nat?” Lila asks, eyes wide and tearful.
---
“C’mon kid,” Barton beckons from the doorway, but when she reaches for his outstretched hand, he disappears like smoke in the wind.”
---
“No, you’re not getting it,” Steve shakes his head, frustrated. “You have to go home. Where’s your home, Wanda?”
“I don’t know!” She despairs.
But she does.
---
“To save our family, you must first save yourself, my love,” Vision whispers. He is standing in the ruins of a house that used to be theirs.
“I love you,” Wanda promises.
“Right now, you must love yourself,” Viz says, eyes forlorn. Wanda wants him so desperately it stings, throbs, agonises, but she knows better than to reach out.
---
“Now you’re getting it,” Steve promises, spinning her away so he's free to join his wife.
---
He is replaced by Da, guiding her feet across the small, empty apartment. There is no violin to dance to, but he guides her all the same. His hands are very warm.
Da says nothing, but Wanda hears it all the same.
---
“You’re going to fall,” Wanda says. (I was falling. I will fall.)
“Yes,” Natasha agrees. “But we’re not here to save me. I’ve crossed my t’s, dotted my i's. It’s your turn, Wanda Maximoff, and you are going to be magnificent.”
---
“My baby girl,” Mama smiles.
---
“I didn’t know, you know,” Stark says.
“I know,” Wanda whispers to the wind.
---
She is running through the streets. She is chasing something.
---
“Billy,” Tommy gasps, resurfacing in the local pool, his hair a mess.
---
Agatha, wicked and wretched and baring her teeth, appears in the bedroom belonging to Rebecca’s son. She is laughing and ghostly and not quite dead.
Wanda abhors her.
---
She is so proud of her boys. So infinitely proud. They have found their way back to each other and held on. Lifelines.
They will protect each other as she could not.
---
“I can’t feel you,” she whispers, aghast.
“My love,” Vision replies, his eyes closed but his voice clear, “of course you can. You are the only one who can.”
---
Babička says “you’re running out of time.”
“You’re dead.”
“ Yes , holčička,” Babička sighs, exasperated, “but you are not, and you’re running out of time.”
---
"Well," Vision concedes, "one of the only ones."
---
Her little boys, her two little boys, her two little wonders. The little speedster and his mind-reading brother (the little speedster and his mind-reading sister. He’s fast and she’s weird. One entity, one unit, one team). She loves them so much it aches.
“Mom,” Tommy says. “Mom, when are you coming home?”
“You’ve been away so long,” Billy pouts.
“Yeah,” Tommy agrees. “I miss you.”
“I miss you too, baby,” Wanda says, hot tears streaming down her freckled cheeks. “I miss you both. I miss you all.”
---
“So come back,” Vision says.
---
“You know you have to go,” says a voice, and finally, finally, it is Pietro, Pietro as she last knew him, fierce and dust covered from battle, not yet pierced by bullets.
She reaches a hand out. It connects. She grips like a lifeline. “It’s warm here.”
Pietro’s lips quirk. “So go out there and build a fucking fire, Wanda.”
She rolls her eyes, and then turns serious. “You’re not out there.”
“You have to go home,” Pietro says. He holds out his hand and they start to dance, even though Pietro never learnt to dance at all.
“Oh,” she says, crashing through disappointment. “Oh. You’re not real at all.”
“Of course not,” he scoffs. They sway to the violin’s crescendo.
“I love you,” she says anyway, pulling him close for a hug.
“I already know that,” Not-Pietro replies, but he lets his body go soft, and into her bloodred hair he whispers “and you know that I love you more than anything.”
You're not real, Wanda thinks. You're not you. Not him.
But it doesn't matter, because she knows the definitive truth of it anyway.
“You have a new home, Wanda,” he says fondly, tugging her hair as her steps back. “That’s not a bad thing. That’s a very beautiful thing.”
“You’re right,” Wanda agrees, “you don’t sound much like him at all.”
Almost-Pietro makes a face. “Yeah, well, I’ll be waiting for you, some day. Now, you look after my awesome nephews and my awesome sister and collect me some goddamn stories.”
“Alright,” Wanda sniffles, wiping her face of tears. Goodbyes are still awful. But Pietro knows. He has always known.
---
There is a whole mountain on top of Wanda Maximoff’s bones. But there is more than a mountain worth of power in her body.
She opens her eyes, blinks the dust from them. She takes a deep breath, and another, and another. One year at a time. Go home. You owe them everything. But Wanda owes her newest family more than that.
Breathe in. Breathe out. You belong in this world, even when everyone is telling you that you do not. Scarlet tendrils chase themselves through the cracks in the granite.
Wanda smiles, a little manic. She is a gull, and the wind has stopped.