Chapter 14
Her eyes snapped open that night in bed with Steve. He stayed in a peaceful rest beside her, but she had to take a deep breath to calm herself.
Pietro was healed. He was trying to reach out to her from somewhere.
When she tried to connect with him, their bond seemed a little less clear to her. Distant, like when they were kids and before the scepter. Wanda wondered halfheartedly if it was because of Steve pressed against her in the warmth of the bed, but it was hard to know.
She leaned back against him, still trying to call out to Pietro with no luck. She called over and over into a void with no answers.
Uncertain of the future, she fell into a fitful sleep.
Steve moved around the kitchen with ease, going from counter to counter as he got breakfast ready for them. She couldn’t shake the feeling that Pietro was there with them, but no matter how much she reached out she found no connection to her twin.
She stood without much thought, reaching out for Steve and wrapping her arms around him, her fist balling up to the back of his shirt.
“You okay, Wanda?”
She said nothing at first, inhaling his scent, the sound of his heart, and just how solid he felt in her arms.
“Something’s coming. I don’t know what it is, but things will change soon.”
She felt a light touch on the small of her back and then on her hips.
“You aren’t leaving, are you?” He asked quietly, close to her ear as though somebody might be listening.
“No, I’m here. I’m with you.”
But she couldn’t shake the feeling and buried her face into his shirt and inhaled lightly.
“I feel like Pietro is closer.” She admitted.
“Have you been able to make your connection with him?”
“No. He’s here…but still so far. I’m not sure what to make of it.”
Wanda was certain her eyes flashed red for a moment before fading to their natural color, as though she could reach out then and call Pietro. Perhaps with time, but it remained elusive to her then.
She sighed, letting Steve go and taking her seat back at the small table. He watched her, but she didn’t read his mind then. She liked the way he looked at her. Almost boyish, maybe a little shy, but with a certain heat and affection that sent a thrill through her.
“We make the most of the time we have,” she told him, her accent thick as she thought of her home and how she wished she had been grateful for what she once had.
The call that would change everything again came in the middle of the night. Three simple words that had the both of them getting dressed and packed within minutes to leave.
“He took Natasha.”
Once again, Wanda found herself passenger to a plane crossing the country in record speeds. New York was below them, the rest of the Avengers meeting at Stark’s tower. She braced herself for that, her heart pounding the closer they got to the famous landmark.
Steve reached out and bumped the back of her hand with his fingers, “it’s going to be okay.”
She could only offer a small and nervous smile as they finally landed. The city was gorgeous and bright even so late at night, but there was no time to enjoy it when they went inside. There were familiar faces inside that she had met like Clint and Sam, but others she knew by reputation and screens only. Mostly, she saw Tony Stark and the logo she had stared at for those two horrible days in the rubble. She said nothing, following in just beside Steve and trying to go unnoticed by the others. It worked, probably because there was somebody much more interesting in the room.
She wasn’t sure if it was a man or not, despite the shape and appearance of him. The skin was red and smooth, he towered over everybody in the room, and when she reached out to his mind, his thoughts were linear and steel. Calculated in a way that was odd and new to read, but not wholly unpleasant.
“What do we have?” Steve asked, unconcerned for now by the odd addition in the room. Wanda herself managed to go unnoticed for the time.
“He took Natasha when we were recovering a package that had our new friend here.” Clint gestured to the odd occupant.
“We’ve picked up on a signal in Europe. We need to go now, but Thor’s still missing, and Vision here thinks that Ultron has an army already waiting for us.” Banner threw in.
“As impressive as you are, I suspect Ultron has many tricks at his disposal.” The odd man spoke, his eyes lingering on Wanda. “We have not met. I am Vision, and you are?”
“Wanda.” She answered, feeling uncomfortable with eyes around the room focused on her.
“Your power is the same one that birthed me. The stone,” he gestured to his forehead, “created both of us.”
“The scepter?”
“Merely a casing, this was the real source of power.”
“I’m sorry, who is this?” Stark asked, gesturing in her direction.
Wanda bristled, refusing to look in his direction.
“She’s with us,” Steve told him after an awkward stretch of silence that everybody seemed to notice.
“I’ll help you find Natasha.” Wanda threw in, hoping to save some face. It seemed to satisfy the room that launched into rescue plans.
“Can you narrow the location?” somebody asked.
Wanda could have laughed and cried at the same time when somebody else answered, “Sokovia.”
Her eyes were red, and her fingertips had just the slightest tinge of power to them. The quinjet they got on was much larger and much faster than others she’d been on before. Her nerves were not as bad, at least. She was anxious, but ready to leap at any moment. In her heart of hearts, she knew Pietro had gone home too. They would reunite, they would have to make some decisions. She just hoped that Steve staying in her life was one of those outcomes. She tried a few times to call out to Pietro through their connection, but their growing closeness did nothing to strengthen communications.
I’m coming. I’ll find you she chanted to herself.
Steve sat beside her once he finished preparing with the others, his knee bumping into hers, she was tempted to grab his hand for reassurance but resisted when she felt others looking in their direction. Some things should stay private, at least for the time being.
“You think your brother is going to be there?”
“I know he is. I feel it.”
“When we land and figure out the situation, we’ll find him.”
“Thank you, Steve.”
Her heart was pounding, excitement and fear making the trip harder to tolerate. She wanted land and Sokovia, and Pietro, Natasha and Steve alive and beside her.
“What does Vision think Ultron is planning?” She asked, realizing she probably should have paid attention to the others when they had first left New York.
“He’s not sure, but nothing good. Ultron seems to think he has all of the answers for solving the world’s problems. Tony and Bruce have given up on a killswitch. They think he’s evolved too much since going offline. Vision’s working on erasing him online, but we’re going to have to destroy his physical form to really get rid of him.”
She nodded, remembering how strong he had been when they’d fought in DC. His height and strength could easily have killed the average person. He’d gotten the jump on her, and it was only because of his mercy that she had survived their encounter. She wondered, even briefly, what that meant for her going into this.
Luckily, when Wanda looked around the jet it was very obvious to her that she was among a group that was far from average.
“Stay with me when we land. We’ll find wherever Ultron’s holed up with Natasha and maybe your brother will be there too.”
She nodded, slow and tired. Pietro would be there.
“Do you know how we’ll find Natasha?”
“We’re picking up on a signal, they just have to narrow it down to find her. Bruce said he’d be able to when we landed.”
Wanda looked around and tried to imagine what it would be like when everything was over.
No matter how hard she tried, there were no visions of the future or any false comforts that everything would be okay.
Without thinking, she reached out and held Steve’s hand.
Wanda hadn’t been home in months. Sokovia was a small country, but the population in the cities were dense and the homes stacked on top of each other. She’d almost forgotten that, having been in the States for a while, and before that a compound in the middle of nowhere. Now, back in the streets of Sokovia, she remembered the smell in the air, the way the buildings were tall but still feel like home. She recognized the language and the people that spoke her mother tongue.
Worst of all, she remembered the static electricity in the air that lingered after bombs had gone off and what it sounded like to hear her neighbors dying.
The Avengers had landed in the middle of a battlefield as Sokovian’s fled from the city’s center. When she tried to slip into a few minds not completely lost in shock and terror, what she saw was blurs of mechanical bodies and red eyes hunting them. She also saw a blur of a human running and knew it had to be Pietro.
The sounds of fleeing and the city falling apart made it difficult to yell loud enough. She saw Steve in the middle of it all starting to shout his orders. She pursed her lips, and with just a little smack of power sent everything she had seen to him. Enough that he stopped speaking for a second, his eyes finding her, he gave a small nod before returning to the Avengers. She could hardly hear him when the ground began to shake. Wanda reached out with her powers, trying to find any trace of Pietro. It didn’t help her concentration much, when she felt a hoard of those mechanical monsters crashing down on them.
“Steve!” she yelled, pointing in the general direction of the hoard.
“Eyes up!” he called to the others.
Despite the assemblage of such a unique and powerful group, she was surprised at just how much fear she felt from the lot of them. The underlying and palpable terror they buried as the hoard grew closer.
Wanda was scared too, and it made her feel better to know she wasn’t alone in that. She calmed her mind and gathered at that familiar and burning feeling of power. It had begun to feel like second nature, she realized with some pride. She kept her feet planted steady to the ground, not far from the Avengers or Steve, and the moment she saw flying robots coming headfirst at them, she used everything she had to rip them apart.
Wanda went headfirst into it, her eyes searching for her brother but her heart constantly going back to make sure Steve was okay. More often than she probably should have, she found herself looking away from the hordes of robots so that she could check on him over and over. Her power wrapped lightly around him, so that she knew every close call and near hits. She withdrew from him, when it became apparent that he was doing fine without her constant vigilance. Wanda needed to focus on herself, she realized this when she felt her hair rise and fall with proximity to flying monsters.
She buried her fear, she kept her eyes open, and no matter how much she wanted to run away, she forced herself to fight.
Wanda wasn’t sure how long the fight had been going. In the chaos of robots, she had lost track of Steve and the others. She only had a vague picture that Clint was just around the corner from her, but otherwise felt on her own. She was finally used to the robots with deadly intent and thought she could handle what was being thrown at her. It was when the earth beneath her began to shake and the buildings around her also quivered that she realized something else was happening.
In her earpiece, she listened with horror when Stark told them something that simply sounded impossible.
“He’s lifting the entire city! It’s an extinction level event if it falls once he’s high enough.”
Wanda wanted to think it was a lie, but the ground continued to shake beneath her, and when she looked ahead to the mountain’s miles away, she realized they were already reaching the peaks of them.
She stared in awe, her legs shaking with the ground she looked around at the buildings that surrounded her. They wobbled and cracked but stayed mostly upright.
Before she could move or try to get away from them, she felt the wind rushing past her and her body moving at greater than humanly possible speeds.
“Pietro!” she nearly cried, and maybe she did shed a few tears when he finally stopped and lightly deposited her to the ground.
“Wanda!” he yelled with equal excitement, “you shouldn’t be here, it’s too dangerous.”
“I didn’t come alone, but you shouldn’t be here either!”
“The Avengers?”
“Yes, why?”
“I just met one of them. Not so bad.”
“Who?”
“The Captain.”
Her heart skipped for a second, but she tried to school her face before her twin could pick up on anything.
It was no use. He could read her better than anyone.
“Wanda?”
“Like I said last time we connected, he’s my friend.”
He still watched her with an obvious skepticism, but there was no time to push it further. It was getting harder to breathe as the air began to thin out around them.
“Well, I really hope your friend has a plan for this madness.”
Wanda looked around them and hoped for the same. Pietro threw his arms around her and she hugged him back with everything she had.
The first time in months, Wanda saw Fury albeit from a distance. The helicarriers were at level with the flying city, and the inhabitants evacuated in a semi-calm trickle.
Whenever the lines became too congested, Wanda would use her powers to ease their fears and move with just a little less shoving. Pietro had gone off to help stragglers, but never went too far.
She held her breath, looking at the slowly abandoned city and thought maybe they might actually get away with this and prevent any more bloodshed in Sokovia.
And then she heard the rapid fire of gunshots as the robots returned.
It seemed silly to even try and ease the panicking crowds from their stampede.
When Wanda thought back on it, she wasn’t sure how to describe the feeling of bullets tearing through not-her. It wasn’t like the last time, when she’d been in Washington and had felt that single bullet tear through Pietro’s shoulder. This time, it was an array that sprinkled through his body and left her near breathless.
He wasn’t far, and she could feel the life still inside of him, albeit slowly fading. In her panic, she turned and ran to the doomed city, calling for Steve over and over until she realized she was using her mind and not the transmitter in her ear.
It didn’t matter, because Steve heard her and met her where Pietro lay slumped next to a small crying child.
The hours that followed were a blur to Wanda, but she would see it on the news stations for weeks. Her home, her city and country, all gone in a matter of hours. A crater remained, but little else except thousands of refugees unsure where to go next.
When Pietro finally made it out of surgery, the doctors would not give her any answers aloud. Rather, she had to reach gently into their minds and see the fifty-fifty chance of her brother surviving the night.
Of all the powers the scepter could have given her, for the first time Wanda wished she could not read minds. To heal broken bodies would have been so much more preferable in that instant. Pietro lay crumpled, somehow smaller than Wanda remembered. He hadn’t been eating as much, his cheeks almost looked gaunt. Not to mention, the streaks of blonde in his hair that were new. She couldn’t take her eyes off of him, no matter how tired she became. Her eyes stung, but Wanda did not move an inch while sitting at his bedside.
The hum of voices and thoughts were pushed aside, her focus so singular that she was nearly taken by surprise when Steve came into the room.
“How’s- how’s he doing?”
She blinked a few times, only now realizing how cramped her body was, “okay, I think? The doctor gave him fifty-fifty, but I know he’s stronger than that.”
She hated how unsure it sounded out loud, but Wanda just knew Pietro would walk away from this. He had to.
“How are you feeling?”
She flinched, feeling a mountain of emotions after such a long day of loss threatening to beat her down. Wanda buried it as deep as she could, but she was not strong enough to hide everything. A dry sob escaped first, her entire body shaking as she lowered her face into her hands, and the rest of her sobs made it hard to breath. She was pulled into Steve’s embrace, her arms crumpled between them, her hair felt sticky from her tears and she felt bad about ruining his shirt after, but in that moment, it just felt good to cry.
"I'm here, Wanda. Don't worry, I'm not going anywhere."