It’s strange, she thinks, for two to come into the world together yet leave it separately. For her, as half of a whole, to leave it completely empty.
It’s a thought that comes to her for the first time at ten years old, hiding under a bed her other half. She doesn’t voice it out until six days later when an officer asks them about their parents as they’re sat on the sidewalk outside a fire station. Wanda simply peers up at the man. With quivering lips, she begins to answer pathetically until Pietro speaks up himself; she doesn’t pay much attention, but she catches something along the lines of Novi Grad bombing and no other family.
No other family. That’s one way to put it.
The officer offers a sympathetic nod and goes back inside the station. If she wasn’t so tired, she might’ve been disappointed, angry even, that he didn’t bother to help. But she doesn’t blame him, and neither does Pietro; with the war still raging, they can’t afford to extend an olive branch to every orphan in Sokovia. There are too many to count now.
So Pietro takes her hand and gives it a squeeze which she understands as reassurance that, while there may very well be no one else left in the world she can turn to for help, he is there. She reciprocates both the gesture and the sentiment and turns her head down to watch the ants crawl over her socks.
But it’s not until sundown when the thought returns, as they’re walking to the nearest bakery to rummage and beg for scraps. And once Pietro has escaped with half a loaf of bread and pulled her into an alley, she’s finally able to put it into simple words. Through a mouthful, she asks: "Will you die before me?"
Pietro simply stares at her until after he’s swallowed his portion. "No," he says, "we go together."
"How do you know that?"
"Mama and Papa did." He’s nonchalant in his answer, enough that he can have another few bites before continuing. "We go together," he says again, "because family is forever and I will not leave you." Wanda simply nods without further question and eats the rest of her piece. She doesn’t drift off to sleep so easily that night, lying on his soot-stained jacket spread out beneath them as she thinks about his answer; it’s a nonanswer, really, or maybe just a naïve one. But he’s allowed to be naïve.
And if he is, then so is she—nudging him awake, she whispers, "We won’t go. We must survive. Still together." He ponders for a second, half-asleep, then nods as he scans over her in concern. "I am okay. Go sleep."
The thought lingers every day they spend on the streets, flaring up whenever there are close calls with shop owners or soldiers. But it’s not until the Hydra days that the thought invades her mind completely: it contorts into the darkest breed of fear the moment they’re torn apart and thrown into their cells, and it continues to grow with every experiment, every smack and whimper she hears through the wall, every we must survive she’s able to trace into the dust-covered floor. It continues to grow and corrupt and overwhelm until it finally begins to manifest itself into reality: the scarlet smoke, floating around her fingers, illuminating her veins, and the low hum in the back of her mind that isn’t new—it was just dormant.
It takes a few rounds in solitary and more than a few brushes with death for her to be able to use her abilities at will. The first message—We must survive. Together. Nobody first.
His mind doesn’t seem shocked in the slightest; it’s hardly a foreign sensation to be in each other’s heads—in a way, they always have been. But she can hear him clearer now, and his voice is already so different when he thinks—We will survive.
And they do survive—he sprints her out of the fortress and they come face to face with these people who call themselves heroes, and it’s something she scoffs at; stealing the sceptre wasn’t a heroic deed. Saving her and her family eight years ago would’ve been.
But that’s irrelevant now; at the tail end of those years, they find themselves on the side of the ‘heroes’ as they all bleed to save Sokovia. Some more than others.
Pietro, the most.
Go is the last word she will ever speak to him; a slap in the face with the force of every we go together ever exchanged between them. Eight long years of wondering which of them would go first despite Pietro taking every opportunity to reassure her that they would—they would go together, and foolishly, she'd tried to convince herself to believe him. She never did. And she is right, in the end, standing in the very centre of her homeland, when she feels half of her brain go blank like a rope sliced clean in two—the emptiness becomes deafening as she falls to her knees and all her senses muddle together before exploding—blinding red takes over as her magic tears its escape out of her body, and it’s nothing but pure and raw and fucking excruciating. Then it’s all over in a second.
One second. Because that’s apparently all Pietro’s life was worth. One second to draw the line between dead and alive and half and whole. One second to determine who between them was right all along.
And then eight more years after that led her here, to Wundagore. Where it was written in stone what she would become; that every choice she ever made was an illusion. It doesn’t make her angry. It doesn’t make her feel anything at all. Once the pillars crumble and the mountain begins to fall in boulders, she pulls back—she simply sits, welcoming every stone that falls as she traces meaningless words in the dust.
Nobody first. We go together.
Family is forever.
We must survive. We will survive.
In the end, neither of them do; when she can no longer see the sky, hear her pulse over the rocks, it is peace that she feels. Peace, of all things, in her acceptance—it’s the rubble that killed her parents, the rubble that buried Pietro’s body, so it’s only right that she surrender to the rubble as well—because if they can’t go together, they'll go the same way. And the last thought, the final thought that runs through her slowly sobering mind, is one that never truly left: it’s still strange, she thinks, for two to come into the world together yet leave it separately. For her, as half of a whole, to leave it completely empty.
And it’s funny, really; two weeks of creating and crossing universes to find Vision, to find her twins, only for them to slip her mind entirely in her very last moments. But it makes sense; maybe it’s time she finally leaves them behind for good, because it’s not them she’ll see on the other side.
Wanda Maximoff’s entire lifetime has been spent at her fate’s twisted mercy; every moment spent with the world forcing her to purge every sliver of her soul from her body. And now she’s just one stone away from reprieve. From being whole again.
One stone. One second.
And finally, the count stops: born twelve minutes younger, died exactly twelve minutes shy of eight years older. Time and space are insignificant under the weight of her Transian mountain; they lie together with ruins for headstones as they should’ve so many years ago, long before the thought that they may not go together could ever enter her mind.