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February 10, 2016
Wanda woke well into the morning. She couldn’t yet puzzle out why. Her consistent hour of rising is 8 each day (which is among the earliest, considering half of the Avengers could practically be considered nocturnal animals. Emphasis on nocturnal. And on animals). Warm light from the winter day’s high sun streaked through the window to bathe and brighten the bedroom.
She rolled halfway over to squint at the bedside clock. 10:57, odd. She couldn't immediately remember the last time she'd woken up so late. Something in her ached, illogical and inconsistent given how, as it stood, she'd slept even more than usual. She rolled back to return to her original position in bed, a bed which strangely felt a bit too big all of a sudden, all over again. It had been quite a learning curve, coming to the compound and adjusting to a queen size mattress all to herself, when all her life before had been spent sharing a twin size with her twin… brother…
….Oh.
She floundered for a second for her voice, and it came out in a faint creak. “Friday, what day is it?”
“It is Wednesday, th’ tenth of February,” the home AI responded in her chipper Irish twang.
Ugh. Wanda immediately rolled back over and shoved her head under her pillow.
How long she stayed buried in bed, she didn't know. She didn't pick her head up to peer at her clock, and time grew hazy, lost in reveries of memories of nineteen years of life with her brother right by her side through every second of it. Time grew even hazier when miserable desolation coursed through in waves, smothering out the distant rose-tinted joy of the past and leaving an oppressive gnawing dread of the future in its wake, a future where she is doomed to endure the rest of her life as only half a pair.
And that future started now. It had been easier to ignore in the past months, because at least they’d been the same age. But now, she turned 20 and Pietro remained 19. And he would remain 19 while she turned 21, and then 22, and so on for however long she was unlucky enough to live. He was supposed to be right here beside her, turned 20 and twelve minutes, but instead he was rotting in his grave on the edge of the compound grounds where he would stay rooted in place as time continued its cruel, stubborn march for her without him.
Her head was pounding in her anguish as if a physical manifestation of her grief and desolation the likes of which hadn’t felt this strong in months. Or maybe it was due in small part to the deluge of tears she hadn’t realized had been streaming on and off from her aching eyes for the past however long. It took her a minute or two to register when the pounding she felt transitioned to an actual audible sensation, not just trapped within her own throbbing skull. Someone was banging on her door in bursts, pausing for a minute between each knocking session to wait for her to answer, before ultimately picking right back up at the racket.
Wanda clenched her jaw and clamped the pillow down over her head, squeezing her eyes shut to ignore it, ignore the world. It was miserable being in bed, but she knew that the moment she stepped out of it, the full weight of the implications of today would crash down on her and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to pick herself back up. There she stayed through several rounds of knocking, which started off polite but steadily picked up in both urgency and amplitude. It really didn't help her feel better.
“Come on, Wanda-!”
Clint. She should have realized. She flopped over and pressed the pillow further onto her face. But now that she was paying attention, even if she somehow could successfully ignore the banging at her door, the man's insistent and persistent mental presence on the other end refused to be pushed to the wayside so easily. Loosing an agitated growl between gritted teeth, Wanda sharply yanked the covers off of her and threw her legs over the side of the mattress. Another bout of knocking came and went before she could gather together enough will to actually stand.
As she anticipated, she felt abruptly heavier and more light-headed. All of a sudden, everything was real. She was no longer safe in the bliss ignorance of her bed; now she had to face the real world where she was 20 and her older twin brother was 19. She wasn’t looking forward to it.
Fortunately, irritation was a plenty good motivator to stamp those biting feelings down as she tramped for the doorway, ready to glare at Clint with the full force of everything she’s got until he caved and scampered away. She pried the door open to find the man with his fist up, poised to start knocking again probably within a half a second. He aborted the motion and instead quickly flashed an annoyingly bright smile. “Hi.”
Wanda finally opened the door after no less than ten minutes of knocking. Clint wasn’t a quitter, that was for sure; especially not for this. But he’d be lying if he said he hadn’t been losing faith that she’d respond at all. When he laid eyes on her, he noted that she looked… pretty terrible, in just about every way that one could look pretty terrible. But he’d of course expected as much, and steadfastly held his tongue.
“Happy birthday,” he interjected without preamble, pulled the card out of his jacket and thrust it to her. Her eyes stared blankly at the offering -- or, perhaps it would be more appropriate to say glared. It felt pretty awkward, standing there with his arm out for the several seconds that neither of them made a move, but to be honest Clint thrives in awkwardness. Eventually her stony eyes flicked back up to his, still rife with that incredulous irritation at the intrusion that is his presence. Alright, changing track.
“I also got one for Pietro,” he informed after her eyes had once again dropped dully to the outstretched card, as if willing for it to combust into flames or something. Abruptly at the mention of her brother, that green gaze sharpened for the first time yet today and darted up to leer back at him. “You can come with me to give it to him if you want.”
Another awkwardly extended moment ensued, with Wanda -- still yet to say a single word -- rooted stiff and unmoving in her doorway, her eyes fixed resolutely on his. She wavered, though; first a tremor in the hand clinging to the doorframe, a tightening in her throat and around her eyes, and the tell-tale tremble of her chin. She swallowed thickly and her eyes showed the barest hints of wetness, threatening to add to the thin sheen already on her blotchy red cheeks. Her throat and jaw worked a few times before she could quite wrangle them to make a coherent sound, and even then came out only the quietest, meekest, and most pitiful agreement. “...Okay.”
Clint nodded his acknowledgement. “It’s pretty cold out,” he noted plainly, glancing briefly over her rumpled pajamas. “You might want to change into something warmer.” Wanda hovered in the doorway a few moments longer, then dimly nodded and eventually stepped backwards into the room and slowly closed the door before her.
Technically this was an opportunity she could exploit to bail on him, to disappear back into her bed and never step foot out of it again for the rest of today as he was sure she had originally planned to do, but Clint had faith that she wouldn’t. Still, that faith began to waver as several minutes passed without her reemergence. He was just beginning to consider knocking again or straight hollering through the door for an update, when at last it slowly creaked open and Wanda hovered hesitantly in the doorway. She’d switched out her pajama shorts for some warmer sweatpants, plus a sweatshirt and a jacket or two. Clint recognized her top layer as the jacket of Pietro’s that must’ve become her favorite, given how she opted for it the most frequently -- the black one with white chevron stripes down the sides of the sleeves. It was the one that he’d been wearing the first time he’d run into Clint (literally), knocking him into the snow and zipping away only to circle back, trotting as he gloated, “You didn’t see that coming?” What a smug, blasted jerk. Yeah, Clint missed him, alright.
He still held the red flowery birthday card out for Wanda, but she still made no move to accept it -- or even look at it, completely blind to any indication of her own birthday in the face of the recognition of what was also Pietro’s birthday. “Can we go?” she surprised him by saying with a jarring earnestness given her previous mood, her voice hoarse but insistent. Her own card could wait; clearly this was more important to her, and he couldn’t blame her.
“Yeah okay, let’s go.”
Clint silently trailed beside Wanda as she led the way out into the brisk gray outdoors, all the way over to the far end of the compound’s grounds opposite from her bedroom. He respected her own disinclination to speak; besides, he wasn’t sure he could come up with any suitable topic of conversation during a march to a dead birthday kid’s gravesite. Kind of a tough ask.
Dead brown grass veiled in a shell of frost crunched beneath their feet, growing increasingly untamed as they approached their destination on the edge of the surrounding woods. Clint spotted the simple granite headstone a while away, sitting innocuously in a small clearing outlined by a copse of trees. It was a very nice location that Wanda had selected all those months ago, not too far from a creek that funneled into the river. In the couple of times he’d been here, it was always peaceful -- just as it was now, despite the chill and muted scenery of mid-winter.
They’d installed a bench overlooking the grave in the first month or two after the funeral after painfully witnessing Wanda simply stand before the tombstone for hours on end, rain or shine, every day for weeks. Clint wordlessly made his way over to it and sat down, ignoring the biting cold of the stone seeping through his pants and jacket back. The kid herself, however, bypassed the bench to go directly to the grave itself, her eyes gracing over the inscription.
Петро Максимов
10.2.1996 - 24.3.2015
Син, брат и херој
(Son, brother, and hero)
ת’נ’צ’ב״ה
It was a simple epitaph, engraved into the blue silk granite of the headstone with a string of Hebrew letters lining the bottom. Although it was approaching a year now, and he’d come by several times before, the dates on the tomb never failed to strike a pang within him at just how young this boy had been taken from this world every time he saw the numbers carved in stone. That kid had been gunned down, just freshly nineteen, after less than two decades of a life filled with hardship that Clint would never know. And he doubted he would ever be able to scrub himself of the guilt he felt every time he saw those dates, or heard Wanda cry, or walked out here to pay his respects.
After all, he was the reason that the lifeline had been cut so short. Pietro had given his life to save his, for reasons Clint still hadn’t come to understand, and he would never let himself live it down regardless of the kid’s good intentions or even whether or not Wanda herself had absolved him of guilt. It was his fault that the kid was in the ground right where they stood on this day, never passing teenagerhood, instead of turning 20 right beside his sister, making her laugh instead of weep.
Wanda shot him a glance out of the side of her eye, probably having picked up on his guilty spiral. Oops. It probably wasn’t fair of him to put more on her plate today of all days.
He willed his thoughts to still as he passively observed her trace her fingers over the gentle curve of the ogee top of the headstone, her hand trembling minutely and not with cold. She remained there for several moments before stepping back, standing in terse silence. Clint tried his best not to pay attention to the fine moving of her lips in soundless words, seeking to at least give her that amount of privacy.
Eventually the stillness gave way as Wanda softly went up in prayer. Clint recognized the haunting, lilting melody from the funeral. He might not understand the words, but Wanda had once briefly explained that it was a plea to God to provide the dead with rest in paradise. It was a nice sentiment that he wholly respected, even if he personally had pretty much left religion far behind.
A hush once again descended over them as the last notes died off; this far from the compound building conglomerate, the grounds were devoid of sound but for their own breaths and the far-off chitter of one or two birds braving the late winter weather. Wanda pulled a stone from her pocket and stepped forward to place it on the top of the headstone, on the opposite corner as the one she had set ten months ago.
She backed up once more and as several moments passed, Clint recognized that she had finished up what she’d set out to do and was now giving him the floor. He pushed to his feet and trod forward, extracting the second card from his own jacket. It was blue and ocean-themed, since the kid had obviously had a taste for blue color schemes, and Wanda had on one or two occasions mentioned that he had always dreamed of going to a beach somewhere but never had the chance, being trapped in a landlocked poor country. He set the card on the ground before the gravestone, propped up against the granite, and withdrew to stand beside Wanda.
He lightly slung his arm around her back, the both of them peering reverently down at the grave. A beat or two passed in stillness, before Clint gathered together some words in the softness of the moment.
“Happy birthday, Wanda. And happy birthday, Pietro.”