It’s like this wave washing over me.
———
His messy hair and his hand in hers. Laughter, and that mischievous, crooked smile.
She couldn’t stop seeing his face.
———
Again and again.
———
“Wanda!”
A loud, breathless voice had her turning to meet the boy racing towards her.
Pietro was what one might call a demon child when he was younger, always getting into trouble. He would run off, mess up or break something, and come running back to Wanda. But the two of them together - always together - found a way to fix it.
Two small hands reached out, and the boy barreled into them. He took Wanda’s hands firmly, and gripped them with a fervor only young boys could.
Shining eyes met and sunlight smiles split their faces as if words had been exchanged in the glance and-
Aren’t twins such a beautiful thing?
———
It knocks me down.
———
“You know, I’m twelve minutes older than you.”
His voice- she was starting to forget his voice.
She remembered she had been ordering him to leave and help get civilians out, and apparently he had found it hilarious because he was older and should be the one ordering her around. Wanda had laughed at him, told him to go.
(That was the last night she saw him.)
She should’ve said more, should’ve told him she loved him, should’ve went with him, should’ve died instead of him.
How could he be gone?
She had ripped Ultron’s heart from his chest. She had told him she had already died. Told him that was what it felt like.
She had meant it.
Half of her heart had been shot from her chest with the same bullets that killed Pietro, and the scraps of it would stay with her brother. Scrap metal and broken dreams and a hole through her heart and that was all that was left of what she had with him.
There was a fucking hole inside of her, and all she could do was prod it with the memories the way one does when they find a purpling bruise.
He was gone, gone, gone.
How could he be gone? He was so strong, always cocky and confident and smiling, he couldn’t be-
But those were his eyes staring up at her, unseeing. That was his body, used as a human fucking shield to protect people, because of course - of course - he would go out that way, her stupid, selfless brother.
Where his presence had once been, wild and constant and familiar, when she tried to reach out, her power groping for something, anything- there was nothing.
He wasn’t coming back and she couldn’t feel him anymore, couldn’t quite remember his voice or his laugh or the way his hand felt in hers and it hurt.
A tear slipped down her cheek and her half of a heart beat in her chest and her power raged inside her and she hurt.
——
When I try to stand up
———
Wanda joined the Avengers.
She was given the offer, and took it almost immediately. She thought if she was making up for what she did under Hydra, if she was helping people, if she was surrounded by others, that the hole inside her wouldn’t feel so deep. Maybe she could distract herself from it with other people, maybe she could change the world like Pietro had wanted to do, maybe she could die doing the right thing so she could see Pietro again-
Oh god, she knew it wasn’t going to be that easy, but she was so desperate to stop feeling like half a person, so desperate to feel whole again.
She didn’t want to replace Pietro. She didn’t want to forget him. She wouldn’t. Wanda refused to let the hole inside her close completely, as if keeping it would somehow bring him back to her one day.
(She knew it wouldn’t, but, goddammit, she couldn’t stop her half a heart from hoping it.)
So she refused to let herself heal all the way, promised herself she would always keep that hole, that empty space where a Pietro was supposed to be.
But she was so exhausted and numb and would it really be so bad if she let those raw edges heal just a little bit?
Clint would say it wasn’t so bad.
He had told her that it wasn’t her fault. That it wouldn’t be betraying him to let herself heal. Clint had told her that it’s okay to smile even though he’s not here to smile with her, and that Pietro would’ve wanted her to try and learn to be happy again.
She could practically feel Pietro knocking his shoulder into hers, telling her with that laughter in his voice to listen to the ‘old man’.
When she had talked to Steve, he had said that an old friend had once told him something, and that he thought she might need to hear it. She had nodded. Had let him continue.
He asked her if she respected her brother, if she trusted him- of course she did. She told him so.
Steve said to her then, with that sad softness in his eyes, to allow Pietro the dignity of his own choice. That he died doing what he thought was right, and that he “damn well must’ve thought it was worth it.”
Steve got quiet at those last words.
(Wanda saw ice blue eyes and dark hair and a steadying arm around small shoulders in Steve’s head. She grazed over a well of pain that she knew he never would’ve allowed anyone to see in him.)
She took his hand, and he let her.
They sat side by side for a while. Grieving their separate loved ones in a blue-gray silence.
He had to go, eventually. And Wanda was left feeling even more alone.
Pietro was gone, her whole family was gone. She was the only one left. Her hands were in her hair, knees up to her chest, a cry lodged in her throat, and she was alone. She was alone, so mind-bendingly, achingly alone and she couldn’t breathe, she was drowning under the weight of it.
Pietro’s unseeing eyes and bullet ridden corpse kept coming back to her, unrelenting like the tides.
She couldn’t breathe.
———
It just comes for me again.
———
Wanda had been watching a sitcom when Vision came in.
She has been trying to distract herself from all of it with that reminder of happier times. Trying to convince herself that Pietro would want her to be watching these and laughing, even if the few times she did laugh were quiet and broken-sounding. Trying to bury the dead eyes watching her and drown the feeling of Pietro and all that he was, there and alive one moment, and wrong, wrong, wrong, and utterly gone the next.
She couldn’t feel him anymore, and every part of her ached and stumbled like she was missing a limb.
Vision had spoken to her gently, in that steady, steady tone of his, when her heart had begun its climb up her throat and her blood began to rush with crippling longing.
He offered support, and she had snapped at first. Brittle and quick to lash out in her pain, aching and aching and aching. But she apologized, and opened up, because honestly, what was left for her to lose?
She told him about the hole inside of her. Of how she was drowning in it.
Vision told her something then. Something she, with all her damned soul, refused to forget. She held it close to her, as if branding it on her heart that way would remind her to keep standing up in the water and to try because she fucking loves Pietro and
Love is not something that so easily gets washed away.
———
“What is grief, if not love preserving?”