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When they set down in America the man her brother died for vanishes for three hours. The rest of the Avengers don’t seem too bothered by this, so she supposes she should be even less so.
But the man owes her a debt, and until he’s paid it back to her, paid her the price of Pietro’s death, she has a right to know what he intends.
He returns with two bags - one in his hand, one slung over his shoulder - and he dumps them both into a shiny black Jeep.
“Hey kid!” he calls, brash and yet somehow gentle. Somehow unmistakably aimed at her. “Wanna escape this hellhole for a bit?”
She wants to escape forever, but Pietro would scold her for that - all affection and worry as he ever was. She looks at the Avengers, talking, agents, working. Escaping for a bit sounds good.
Besides , she thinks, her scarlet ghosting through the void, watching his mind. This man owes me a debt.
They drive for hours. The sun is bright and warm and the car is stifling whether the windows are down or the aircon is on. Wanda doesn’t mind. The heat is nice, compared to the chill memory of Sokovia’s thin air, and she can feel the sweat trickle down her neck when the sun glares through the windscreen.
She doesn’t know where they’re going but it doesn’t matter. She gets the sense that, with this, the where isn’t as important as the going.
So she sits with one arm resting by the half-open window, and watches the horizon.
They make it almost five hours of driving - sixteen hours since Pietro died - before she starts crying. The tears start without warning, great beads of water falling down her cheeks and before she knows it she’s sobbing, great choking breaths heaving their way out of her lungs until her shoulders shake.
She’s cried before, of course, but not like this, this great tearing thing until her throat feels raw and her forehead aches and the archer’s pulled the car over to offer her tissues and water and stuck a blanket over the windscreen to make it dark.
She hadn’t cried this hard even when Mama and Papa had died, and she had seen their bodies go still and bleed out in the chasm below. (If she pauses, if she lets herself remember, she can feel Pietro’s heart go from hummingbird-fast to nothing at all.)
“It’s not easy,” the archer says. “It’s not ever easy, to lose someone close to you.”
That makes her cry more, somehow, until her eyes are burning, and her cheeks feel itchy and she’s too exhausted from tears to protest as he reaches over the gearstick and pulls her gently to lean against him.
“You’re going to be ok,” he says. “One day. You’re strong, you’re clever, you’re still here. You’re gonna get through this.” His arm is gentle around her, his embrace almost pressureless. “It’s ok to cry, and to grieve, and to yell and scream and hate. It’s ok. You’re strong. You’re gonna get through this.”
She falls asleep crying and when she wakes she find herself lying across the back seats of the Jeep, a blanket tucked over her.
In the front, the archer is still driving.
She can see mountains in the distance.
The blank plains seem to stretch forever around them and then it’s blank desert. When they hit the mountains Wanda wakes from her doze but not because of the archer. She feels the pressure change, to something like Sokovia, and moves into the front seat.
“How much further?” she asks, and then again, in English.
He glances at her. “About another hour,” he says. “Then a break.”
“And then?”
He watches her carefully out of the corner of his eye. “Then we can keep going, if you want. Or we can turn back.”
“Keep going,” Wanda says. She wants, more than anything, to lose herself in these plains of silence.
They drive for hours upon hours. They reach the mountains proper and drive alongside them - sheer cliff face to each side, rising or dropping, and foothills spilling out onto the plains.
Slowly, inexorably, they rise.
“Why are you doing this?” Wanda asks, and then has to repeat herself in English. She wishes Pietro were here, she wishes it more than anything but he isn’t, he is never going to be at her side again and she doesn’t know what to do.
Make do with what we have.
That’s what she’d said to Pietro, what he’d said to her. But it was easier to do when they both were there, when they had each other’s strength to lean on - two vines coiled around each other, and when one weakened the other remained strong enough to support them.
Not looking away from the road ahead, the archer shrugs.
For a while she watches the road too, but curiosity overwhelms her and in the blank space between minds she peers, looks out at the only mind she can see.
It shimmers, a purple dark as dusk, blue almost indigo and shot through with silvered steel.
She feels a snippet of lost time shimmer through the archer’s head, silvered steel shaking towards its perfect purple target. Laura, his voice says, and there’s the sensation of a phone pressed to his cheek. Laura this kid died for me. His sister, she’s almost catatonic. What the hell do I do?
A woman’s voice, calm, gentle. What did you do when you brought Nat in?
A sigh, a pause, the sensation of fingers running through hair, trailing gently down a cheek. Gave her space from everyone else. But made sure she wasn’t alone.
She can hear the smile in the woman’s voice. There you go. And when she’s ready, bring her over. Let her have more people to be with.
Kindness, then, and a debt.
This man owes her debt, she had thought that when they had landed. But here, now, he offers kindness too.
They drive through the night, but when Wanda falls asleep she wakes to find them parked by the roadside, archer asleep in the front, a handgun held tight even in his sleeping hands. His mind shimmers peacefully, children’s laughter echoing over the indigo-purple of it.
Wanda curls up on the seats in the back, where she’d woken, and watches the stars out the window.
“We should head back,” she says in the morning, when the archer is brushing his teeth and rinsing his mouth out with water from a bottle. He passes her a toothbrush, the toothpaste, her own bottle of water.
He watches the horizon, a hawks gaze parsing out everything that is invisible to everyone else.
“You sure about that?” he asks. “You ready for that?”
She brushes her teeth, considers. She stares at the horizon, tries to see what he is seeing, but she can’t. She thinks Pietro would have been able to, but-
But he isn’t here. He’s never going to be here, at her side, ever again.
She spits out the toothpaste, rinses her mouth with water, then gulps the bottle.
“I will be,” she says. “When we get back.”
The archer looks at her, hawk’s eyes seeing all the cracks she hides. He sticks out a hand.
“Clint,” he says. “I’m Clint Barton. You ever need to get away again, I’ll help you. I owe you that.”
She pauses, watches him. He does owe her that, her brother dying for him, not for them, a debt owed externally inwards rather than between them both as it had ever been. And, somehow, this man, he understands that.
“Wanda,” she says, taking his hand, shaking it. “Wanda Maximoff.”