Wanda could feel him through the wall. Feel his pain, his frustration, the energy that was coursing through his veins.
It had burned, at first, and while he gritted his teeth and lay spasming on his bed, back arched and taut as a bowstring, huffing out sharply pained breaths through flared nostrils and forcing his screams to stay silent, she had sobbed and curled up into a ball and yelled every time he made a move, because it wasn't her pain but she could still feel it, foreign and strange and horrific. She felt the indented crescents that his nails left on his palms, the bruises on his hunched shoulders where he had been unable to stop himself moving and run into the walls of his cell, the exhaustion in his bones. She could barely feel the tips of her own numb fingers, but Pietro's pain was tangible and real to her. He wanted to see her, make sure she was okay. Her brother didn't believe her when she spoke in his mind, because he had lied so often when they were small and recently-orphaned and alone - 'No, no, I'm not hungry, you eat', 'Of course I'm not afraid of the dark', 'We don't need grown-ups, we're just fine like this' - and this had the same feel to it. She could promise that she was fine all she liked: it wouldn't make it true, and it wouldn't make him believe it any more than he did.
(Maybe Wanda could feel a terrible, pounding ache in her head, and maybe there was something just so, so wrong with the universe that she could sense with her new powers, and just maybe they were what was wrong with the universe, them and their unnatural gifts. She didn't voice those thoughts to him. Pietro had never had time for existential angst, not when they were only just surviving.)
Wanda tried not to read the minds of the HYDRA operatives around her. Strucker's mind scared her, with his infinite and increasingly demented designs and plans for artificial intelligence and metahumans and the twins themselves, and there was an overwhelming sense of blind, unquestioning loyalty among the foot-soldiers that made her uneasy.
There was something weird in people's heads today. Pietro had - finally - managed to exhaust himself and he was slumped against his cot, barely conscious, so she tuned him out. One of the guards - not so much stupid as just graced with the sheer inability to imagine, which made him ridiculously easy to read - had thoughts that were particularly loud, and she screwed her eyes shut to concentrate, straining to overhear... they're outside the building but closer to breaking in, I will die for the cause, I am prepared to give my life in the service of HYDRA: cut off one head and two shall take its place-
Ugh. The sound of his mind was putridly infantile, like a corrupted child, and she couldn't stand to listen to it any longer than was totally necessary. Vaguely, she wondered who 'they' were. Invaders, enemies, rescuers, salvation?
A loud crash forcibly snapped Wanda out of her thoughts and she startled, little red sparks jumping from her fingertips to form smoking tendrils of ominous red mist that writhed and curled for a few moments around her knees against the floor.
Wanda! called Pietro's voice in her head. Are you hurt? Is this you?!
It's not me. she promised, standing up to stare around. Her vision still seemed... clouded, and she expected that if there was a mirror she'd be able to see that her eyes were red.
"Hey," a voice barked, in English, making her startle back from the glass.
Go to sleep. she ordered her brother, and because his mind had been familiar to her long before she could sense it, he collapsed immediately, his eyes flickering behind their lids as he dreamed.
"I don't wanna hurt you, man." continued the soldier's voice. "Don't make me- aw, fuck."
She could hear crashes and fighting, and then silence but for the quick breaths of the guy left standing. Almost without feeling it, Wanda collided with the back wall of her little cell. 'Observation chamber', Strucker had called it, in his neat, clipped German. Her German wasn't very good, but she knew enough that it certainly was not an observation chamber. There were no windows to be barred, but they were trapped and kept alone, and so it was a cell.
Except, maybe not alone, if she could persuade whoever this was to free them. Better that Pietro was asleep for that- diplomacy was definitely not his strong suit. Nor was patience.
*
Sam abso-fucking-lutely hated HYDRA; he had decided. It wasn't that he liked them back when they were still trying to kill millions of people at once via helicarrier, but that was easier at least than whatever the hell this guessing game was. HYDRA surprise, that was it.
Was it a HYDRA base, or just a shady SHIELD one? Did the base have soldiers in? Brainwashed ones? Illegal experiments? International secrets? Enigmatically dangerous computer codes?
Nah. It was just plain unfair. He was so used to fighting brainwashed goons that he could practically do it in his sleep by now, and last week a radioactive turtle had nearly taken his pinky off. And still no plausible leads on their missing person.
"One hostile, dispatched." he told Steve through his earpiece, shifting all the while on the balls of his feet in case there was another. "And one creepy-ass laboratory. Kinda looks like they grabbed all the paper files they could and..."
He crossed quickly over to the computers, and a few quick key presses quickly enough got him to a empty scene informing him that even the basic coding had been wiped.
"Yeah, the computer's blank too." Sam rolled his eyes at Steve's all-too-heartfelt apologies. The guy was a saint, seriously. "Don't worry about it, Cap. I've always wanted to take a trip out to bumfuck-nowhere, Sokovia."
"Yeah, yeah," sighed Steve, and Sam could practically hear his long-suffering smirk over the line. "Sorry about that."
"And I don't mind kicking ass while the super-soldier sits up in a comfy aeroplane, either."
Steve chuckled and then replied. "Well, you can get out of there once you've checked the next room."
Sam nodded, suddenly professional, and pulled a pistol from his leg holster. There was a half-open door, so surely no one was in there, but you could always rely on HYDRA to be unreliable.
...Holy shit.
Through a dirty, scraped glass screen, he could see the small form of a young woman in what looked like an old fashioned nightdress, pressed up against the wall in fear, her dark hair a curtain over her glowing red eyes.
She gasped in a breath, bandaged fingers scrabbling against an uneven stone wall, and stared right back at him, and when Sam glanced to the other side of the partition between the glass he could see a young man halfway draped over a bed, unconscious but twitching. White energy was flowing between his fingertips, red energy sparked between hers.
"Steve," he barked, brain retreating into Soldier Mode under stress. "I need backup, right now."
"What is it?" snapped Steve, and Sam could tell that his mind was going in the same direction. There were even background noises of running, and Sam suspected his favourite ninety six year old might be jumping out of a plane. "Any hostiles?"
"Negative on that," he continued quickly, glancing around for a key or anything to get the experiments out of their cells but keeping one eye on the woman as he did so. HYDRA produced damaged, traumatised people, people who needed serious help and who flinched at sudden movements, but they also produced very, very, very dangerous people, and Sam didn't want to give anyone a chance to take him down. She had curled in on herself in the corner between a very minimal cot and the wall, still with those big red eyes.
Sam had read the files on the Winter Soldier, and HYDRA most certainly didn't have any qualms about the way they treated the subjects in their trials -worse than animals, like objects. She could be dangerous, or whatever, but she was still a person and he most certainly pitied her.
"Two captives, both not exactly normal. Gonna need to get them out of here as quickly as possible."
"What do you mean 'not normal'?"
"Well," muttered Sam, trying to restrict the horror in his voice to a reasonable level. "They're glowing."
There was a brief silence on the other end, and then: "Ok. Be there in five minutes, tops."
He nodded and flicked his comm off, unsure of what to say. Who knew if these guys even spoke English?
"Just a few minutes," he called anyway, and tried to ignore the way it made her jump. "Ok? It's be alright, we're getting you out in just a few minutes."
He thought she understood, because she kept blinking until the red faded to an ominous backlight and he could see the natural blue of her eyes, and turned her head against the wall so she was glancing meaningfully at the guy on the other side.
"He's alright, I think." he nodded. That wasn't exactly true, since the young man was shaking almost compulsively, but it was close enough.
Steve arrived in a clatter of booted feet and a ringing shield, turned to the subjects with the same horror, and broke off the electronic lock with a single blow.
The girl watched them with big eyes, and went limp just a second before Sam went to kneel before her and lift her in strong arms. She weighed nothing.
*
Pietro didn't have words for his hatred of Tony Stark. Well, he did- all too many. He wanted Tony Stark to burn in a hellfire of his own machines, to feel the pain of everyone he loved being taken from him, to live the rest of his life in the agony that he had caused so many others.
At first, of course, he hadn't felt that.
The first time he saw the word 'Stark', he had sobbed in desperate breaths of the dust that was colouring his hair the same colour it was now, wrapped his arms tighter around his sister, and prayed that dying wouldn't hurt too bad. Stark, for those two days, was a constant reminder that their odds of surviving were shrinking by the second. They had alternated between burying their heads in their hands or each other and staring at it, at their doom.
By halfway through the second day, they had run out of tears to cry - for themselves, for their parents, because they couldn't stop - and whispered words of comfort to offer, and he remembered exhaustion and hunger clouding the edge of his vision until he couldn't see anymore and the only thing he felt was the burning of the rubble in his throat and the little scrapes up and down his body.
Pietro had been so sure he was about to die. Waking up again, in a hospital, had almost been worse.
They volunteered for the experiments, yes, but not to kill Tony Stark.
Everyone was rioting on the streets, and their landlord had seen them at the last riot so they were homeless again where before they had just been on the edge of homelessness, and they were desperate, and HYDRA could help. It would make them strong, to protect themselves and their country and each other. (Later, he'd worked out that it was HYDRA that started the riots, to trick people into thinking that there was enough chaos joining HYDRA was necessary, and felt sick to his stomach. Wanda must have known too, because when she found it in his mind she didn't react.)
He had tried to be strong, so that she didn't have to feel his pain, and the worst part was that he knew it hadn't worked.
He woke up with a groan, his eyes fluttering open to the same harsh lights that had been the cells, and screwed them immediately shut again.
Please, he begged inwardly. Not the tests again. And then he opened his eyes properly. I'm on a table, he identified quickly, but not a medical one. Not strapped down- that's unusual.
Across from him was a well-built blonde man, sat in a folding chair with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, and the weird thing was that Pietro had never seen him before but he was sure he recognised him.
"Who-" he croaked, and then cried out softly as it made his head throb even harder. It was like the worst hangover he'd ever had, only when he'd had a hangover it had been Wanda there giggling at him and finding him a painkiller, and here it was some stranger whose head shot up like a bullet when he heard Pietro speak.
"Hey, you ok?" he heard, with a gentle hand pushing his head back into a more comfortable position. "You're- HYDRA hasn't got you anymore."
An American?
Oh.
Pietro couldn't speak for a moment, for wholly different reasons, and the guy above him started talking again.
"I'm sorry, do you speak English?"
He nodded vaguely, stunned.
"What's your name, kid?"
"I, uh- Pietro." he choked, and then tried to sit up very quickly. "Where is W-Wanda- my sister, where-"
"It's ok, she's safe. The woman?"
Pietro nodded.
"She's totally fine. We just moved you away because you were thrashing around a bit in your sleep."
He winced at that. The procedure - God, he hated that word - had made him so restless, always, even when he wasn't waking.
"I'm-"
"I know who you are." he coughed, grinning bitterly over the man's words. "Captain America, yes? Of the Avengers. I see you on TV."
"Yeah." frowned the Captain, uncertainly.
"You're friends with Tony Stark?"
"What-"
"You know Tony Stark?" he demanded.
"Yes...?"
All the threats that Pietro had thought of over the years, every horrid thing that he had ever wanted to do to Tony Stark, seemed to disappear, and his mind went blank.
He took a deep breath and opened his mouth to speak.
*
"Did Twitchy wake up?" asked Sam grimly, watching the still-sleeping girl on what looked like a guard's bunk.
Steve, as he walked back in, was looking kind of haggard; there was a frown between his sculpted brows.
"He asked me if I knew Tony Stark and then told me to go fuck myself with a cactus."
"O-kay." laughed Sam, giving him that one particular look that just meant 'Your world is so nuts'.
"Yeah," smiled Steve sheepishly. "I know, but it's Tony. The guy's a total asshole."
"If you say so."
Sometimes, Sam thought, Steve forgot he wasn't an Avenger. (Yet. He was working on it, dropping hints here and there, because Sam's entire extended family would freak the fuck out and he wanted to see that look on their faces.) It was probably something to do with the fact that pretty much all of Steve's old buddies were dead, and the only people he knew were cold, unfriendly spies; cheeky, irritating spies (Natasha-'I'm here to pick up a fossil'-Romanov, and Sam was actually kind of scared to have a boner for that woman, which was awesome); or the Avengers. There was Bucky, of course, but whether or not Bucky even remembered his own name was still a matter of discourse.
On the other hand, Sam had seen many a YouTube video of Anthony Edward Stark sans clothes and sobriety, and the news loved him. It wasn't that he didn't have an opinion on Tony, just that he didn't feel that (having never met him) he had a right to voice it.
"Wait," he frowned. "With a cact-"
"His words, not mine."
A couple of feet away, the girl's hands balled suddenly into fists with a startling hiss of red light, and both Steve and Sam were on their feet in seconds. In total juxtaposition to her previous moment, however, she just coughed weakly and turned protectively onto her side as she woke up, the red light dissipating into the air.
Dangerous, reiterated Sam's soldier-mind, and was shut up immediately by his normal mind going poor kid.
"You're going to want to breathe," he told her softly, noting the way that her shoulders had drawn in on themselves and her bearing had become stiff the moment she realised she wasn't alone. "And I promise we're not going to hurt you if you do."
"Who are you?" she whispered, hesitant and nervous as she turned her head to look at them. Sam frowned slightly when he saw that her eyes were red again, but handed her the glass of water he had grabbed anyway.
"My name's Sam."
Baby steps, he reminded himself. She's still scared.
"Sam Wilson." she finished, for him, and his eyebrows shot up.
"Yeah, how'd you-"
"And Steve Rogers."
Wanda scooted herself up so that she was sitting against the headrail of the cot, even rusted and uncomfortable as it was, and wrapped her bandaged fingers tightly around the glass. They still hurt, a little, where Strucker had made methodical little cuts with a scalpel, her numbed and dizzy so she didn't pull away, and doused them in some solution or other to see what would happen. What happened was that she screamed and her fingers clawed and she couldn't control them for a few days, which had been disappointing for him and horrifically painful for her. They hadn't given her any painkillers or anything since the first anaesthetic, other than to sterilise and bandage them when they showed signs of possible infection.
Her mind brushed more deeply against that of Captain Rogers, and the terror that he would never be able to leave the war, that he'd never live a normal life, he'd just be stuck here in a military limbo forever, any traces of his life before Erskine forgotten, struck her so suddenly that she cried out, one hand flying up her to her temple.
"What's wrong?" came Sam Wilson's kind, worried voice, slightly muted. He was genuinely concerned for her, she could feel it, and Wanda realised all of a sudden that it was the first time she had felt that in anyone other than her brother since Strucker's gift had manifested. "I'm sorry," he was continuing, as she tried to block out all the foreign thoughts from her mind. "I don't know your name, but-"
"I-" she began, and was almost immediately cut off.
"Wanda!"
All Sam felt was a whoosh of wind, and there was a blur, and suddenly the girl in front of them was folded into the arms of the young man they had seen, gasping in surprise but wrapping her arms tightly around him and screwing her eyes shut against tears. He just pressed a kiss to the top of her head and rocked slightly from side to side, like a child.
Sam and Steve exchanged a stunned glance, feeling somehow as though they were intruding.
"Your hair," she choked, staring up at him, and he almost laughed.
"What?"
"It's white. Your hair's gone white."
They had cropped it, while he was unconscious, and then offered the explanation that hair as long as his had been was a safety hazard when chimed with his new powers. Not that HYDRA had to give an explanation for anything they did. They usually didn't.
"I can't see it." he murmured, reaching up to tug a strand down. Wanda just smiled brittlely and touched a hand to it.
"I can. I am twins to an old man now, yes?"
"What the hell is even happening." sighed Steve, with so little infliction that it didn't even qualify for a question mark.
Sam raised an eyebrow and called out to them. "I take it you two know each other pretty well, then?"
The boy whipped around, almost as fast as he had run in, and pushed the girl behind him. His eyes were blazing.
"What does it matter to you?"
The accent in his voice only served to accentuate the fact that he was spitting tacks, and both the soldiers could hardly help bristling, inwardly steeling themselves for a fight.
"It doesn't, really," interrupted Steve diplomatically. "We were just wondering what a pair of kids were doing in a place like this."
The girl brushed the boy gently out of the way with a hand, her expression anxious but far more calm than his was.
"Pietro," she murmured. "It's okay. They don't want to hurt us."
"He's an-"
"I know." She surveyed them silently, her eyes big, and then took a deep breath to explain. "HYDRA- they tricked us into volunteering. For medical experiments."
"With a sceptre." added the boy, watching them carefully for their reaction.
"They tricked you?" frowned Steve, and the girl cringed a little, her lips twisting in distaste, while the boy scowled defensively.
"We didn't have any other options."
"We thought we were doing good." she soothed, gently touching his arm again to bring him down from the aggressive mood that she knew was swelling up.
"Look," cut Sam, well-versed enough in this kind of emotional tension from his work at the VA to know that they were going nowhere slowly. "We can sort this stuff out and all, and I'm pretty sure neither of you have done anything wrong by SHIELD's-" Morally grey to the point where everything becomes a blur? That was a little wordy. "Admittedly, ambiguous standards. But you're gonna have to come back to our base of operations to get everything sorted out."
Wanda nodded before her brother had a chance to say anything, understanding. They weren't human, which meant they were dangerous, and also meant they were SHIELD's business, according to Steve's mind. Anything out of the ordinary in this respect was.
A new chance, she whispered in his mind. A better one.
To the Americans, Pietro nodded his assent too. To Wanda, he said That was what the experiments were meant to be. And look how that turned out.
She squeezed his hand in her own, tuning out Steve's talking as they were led up and out of the lab.
This is different, brother. I promise.
Wanda wasn't sure if her powers had boundaries or beginnings or ends. She could read minds, she could manipulate them, she could see the past in another person's memories. So, catching a brief glimpse of the future didn't startle her as it maybe should have done.
It wasn't a vision or a daydream-like scenario. Instead, she felt her brother's mind, in the future, telling her something that made her smile against his shoulder as the plane took off.
Everything's ok. No one's going to hurt us anymore.