She dreamed in streaks of gray and silver.
Something clouded her mind, her sleep, her powers, just at the edge of her vision but too fast for her to catch. It was stalking her, haunting her, following her. She spun in circles trying to find it. She woke up exhausted.
It was an optical illusion just at the end of her perception, beyond the reach of her powers. It was there only when she was not looking. It was taunting her. It was haunting her.
The thing – this illusion – the mirage in the corner of her eye flickered and faded, and then it was there when she was awake. It was gone when she looked, it was always gone.
She was going mad; she was sure of it.
She knew it would happen eventually with every passing day without Pietro by her side. Without having him, without the one person that could ground her, that could help her to control this gift – this curse – that could tell her wholeheartedly and with sincerity that she was more than the unpredictability of her powers. That she was not crazy, mad, a witch.
He’d been her guiding light through all of this, through everything. Through the building collapsing, the loss of their parents, and the bomb, through the riots and Hydra, through Ultron. He’d been the beacon that showed her the way home and now he was gone.
Sometimes she couldn’t remember the exact shade of blue that his eyes were or the way his mouth would tilt into a smirk when he thought he was being particularly clever. Sometimes, it was all she remembered.
“Did you see it?” She asked one night, panicked and begging, turning so quickly that the water in the glass she had been holding sloshed over the rim and onto the floor. “Please, tell me that you-“
“There’s nothing there, Wanda.”
The building was shaking on its foundation and she knew that she was the cause of it, they all knew. The glass fell from her hand, shattering before it ever had the chance to hit the floor, and then every window in the building followed in suit. She saw it in the corner of her vision, flashing and then disappearing, an afterimage of a smirk and snowy hair, blue eyes.
Her eyes flashed red and then her hands, it trailed up her veins, it burnt. He was there and then he was gone but, “He was there.”
They wouldn’t come near her, not when everything was shaking and breaking around her, not when she was confirming every unspoken belief that she was a grenade without a pin. No one met her eyes.
“I saw him,” She turned around again, scanning the room in a swirl of red. He was there. She saw – “Pietro?”
“Pietro!” She called out, voice cracking into a whisper. “Please.”
She felt a hand on her shoulder, so sudden that the lights shut off and the floodlights flickered on. There was a part of her, so hopeful with the childish optimism that she thought Hydra had cut out of her, that she’d see narrow pale fingers with a scar from a jagged piece of glass on the pinkie but she didn’t. It was red and purple, mechanical and warm. Vision.
He said in a voice that felt like calm and ocean waves in the midst of a hurricane, “Wanda.”
“He’s here.”
“No, Wanda, he is not,” Vision said. She felt the sorrow by the buckets pouring out of him in series of ones and zeros and it broke her heart. He pulled her in tight and though she did not know if it was to restrain her or to comfort her, she accepted it gratefully.
She cried.
More things broke, shattering because she was destruction under human skin and she did not have Pietro there anymore to disagree with her. He was gone.
No one say a word about it in the morning.
The windows were taped up and the kitchen cleaned. No one would look her in the eye. She was okay with this.
They were calling it the Battle of Sokovia.
It was an apt name but not very creative. Sometimes when the news was playing, Wanda imagined what Pietro would say about it. Every time they flashed an image of his blurry face and debated if he was a martyr or a terrorist, she could hear him sneer at the very idea that he was either and complain that they didn’t get a picture of his good side. She imagined them mocking the reporters like they used to do in their small apartments after work.
Sometimes, it was like he was there.
It was two months to the day since the battle, since they effectively marked Sokovia off the map, since Pietro…
Two months without him.
She wanted to say that it was easier. Sam told her that it would get easier but it hasn’t. She woke up still searching for his energy signature, for the trail of blue and silver that he left in his wake. She still searched for his face among the crowds.
Sometimes, Pietro’s voice mocked her for crying, for not moving on. Sometimes, there was nothing there, nothing at all. She did not know which was worse.
“I want him to be here.”
“I know,” Sam said. He sat across from her at the ruined table, this was not a session. It was lunch with paper plates and plastic cups. “It will get easier.”
“No,” She replied. “No, it will never be easy.”
Barton said that he knew what she was going through but he lost his brother to time and circumstance not to death and war. He told her that he had looked for Barney once, that he came up short. He taught her how to focus that angry and loss into an arrow and bow, into fist and red energy.
“Hey Scarlet,” He called down to her from the rafters after she destroyed punching bag after punching bag after punching bag without ever touching even one of them. “Wanna cause some real damage?”
“Where?”
“Midtown,” He answered. “Someone’s wannabe Ultron is causing some property damage. We suit up in ten.”
“I’ll be there.”
It was in the middle of the battle, if it could even be called that. These wannabes were more than they had expected and it was taking time to destroy them but it was nothing that they could not handle. She needed this, she wanted to pull apart every reminder that her brother was not here, until it stopped hurting.
She missed him so much.
It was in the middle of the fight that a portal opened, something undefined by shape, color, and space like it was there but that it also wasn’t. Everybody and everything froze and stopped, and they stared. Then tensed up, stood guard because rarely did anything good ever come from a portal but then…
“That’s it?”
There was a flash of silver and gray in the void-like shapelessness of the portal and then a tumble and a trip, and laying at Wanda’s feet was the crumbled heap of – of something. Someone.
The portal shimmered out of existence but Wanda was too busy to notice. She took in the details of the silver jacket, old and torn at the sleeves, and the bottom of the shoes that were treadless from wear despite looking nearly brand new. On the pinkie of the pale hand sticking out from the heap, there was a scar.
“Pietro.”
There was a beat where nothing happened and if Wanda was not so attuned with the universe than she would have believed that the Earth had stopped spinning on its axis. She didn’t dare to even breathe, just to pinch herself. This was real. She was awake.
The silence and stillness was broken by a groaned, “Oh man, my Walkman is busted.”
Then there was nothing laying at her feet, zipping away and all the robots fell broken at their feet. There was a question of something or other from somewhere behind her but – his hair was gray, a shine to it that made it nearly silver, and his face youthful. He was wearing goggles.
“So, uh, what are those things?”
Their heads shot to a fire escape, just barely catching him hanging off it before he was gone. He appeared again next to Tony in a zip, nearly getting shot in the chest with a repulsor beam before he was in between Clint and Natasha.
“Is that what a Sentinel is?” He asked, speaking so fast that it was barely understandable. “Prototype or something? Logan made them seem like they were a way bigger deal than that.”
“Who?”
The blur was next to Steve now, his shield snatched away and observed. “What is this, a big Frisbee?” and then it was tossed away and the kid was gone.
He stopped in front of Wanda, nearly toe to toe with her, as still as she thought it was possible for him to be. When the red in her eyes faded back into blue, he stuck out his hand, “Hiya.”
He wasn’t Pietro.
Everything about him was wrong when she got a good look at him. His face was rounder, had less wear to it, less anger, hunger. There was something very youthful and fresh about him. The clothes and goggles, the glee in his eyes and the accent, it was all wrong yet, there was something there that she could not place that so very distinctly Pietro.
She tried to speak but every word she knew got tangled and stuck in her throat. He zipped away and then was back again with a slice of pizza, “The dude with the claws, Logan, man.”
“Where’s Magneto?” He asked quickly, changing topics almost as fast as he changed locations. It was too fast for anyone to really keep up with him, he didn’t seem to notice.
“Who?”
“Erik Lehnsherr, Magneto,” He spoke, there was a slight vibration to all of his words. “Broke out of the pentagon, stupid helmet, dropped a stadium on the White House… I think he might be my dad. Where is he? He was just-“
“You know,” He said, eyes boring down on Wanda, with this sense of offhandedness in his voice that felt a lot like he was searching for something but trying to look like he wasn’t. He was so close that she could feel his heart pounding in his chest, alarmingly fast. “My sister can do something like that with her eyes, too.”
He stopped and looked as if he was reflecting on what he just said and what those words meant but Tony distracted him, “Hey, Roadrunner, what the hell are you?”
“What the hell are you, Tinman?” He shot back and then, suddenly his pizza was a newspaper and he held it up accusingly. There was devil horns scribbled onto the picture of Tony on the cover, a V-shaped mask over her face. “What is the Avengers?”
“And…” He asked before anyone could open their mouths. “Is this the future?”
Peter took a step towards Wanda again, letting the paper drop from his hand, “Do I know – ow!”
Peter had a lot of words to say about the red headed woman that managed to sneak up on him without him noticing and jammed a needle into a vein in his neck, a lot of words. Starting with ‘what the hell?’ and ‘how’d you do that?’ and progressing from there to ‘that was pretty badass’ and ‘you’re so foxy.’ But as she pulled the needle from his neck, all he could offer was a slurred “son of a…”
Wanda used her powers to stop him from slamming face first into the ground. Her eyes stayed glued onto the speedster’s eyes as they drifted and then closed. They were brown, not blue.
“Was that necessary, Natasha?” Steve had sighed in a way that made it seem like he was feeling his true age. When Natasha just shrugged, he moved on to his next question, “What is a Walkman?”
“A piece of junk technology,” Tony muttered, nudging Peter’s prone body with the toe of his boot. “What is he? Some kind of awful hipster?”
“It’s another speedster, I think,” Natasha shrugged. “Or a teleporter.”
“Either of those are better than a hipster.”
Wanda’s fingers were trembling around the leather rectangular wallet that she had picked from the inside pocket of his jacket. It was free of cash, not even change, just a scrap of paper with a phone number written on it, a business card for a school in Westchester, and a driver’s license.
“Where did he come from?” Clint asked. “Who is he?”
“It’s Pietro.”
Peter’s consciousness came back in waves, slow and then crashing, receding and then rising, and the first thought he was aware of a was a very simple, ‘ow.’
Following slowly by, ‘rude.’
That thought was followed by another, and then another, and then panic rose inside of him when he realized that he could not move his legs. There was a voice, accented and authoritative, “Don’t panic.”
He noted the tinge of pink around the irises in her eyes when he blinked his open and he noticed how they bored into his, searching for something that she seemed to not be able to find. He wasn’t restrained, he just couldn’t move his legs, “What is-“
“It is a sedative,” She said as way of explanation. Her arms were cross around her middle instead of across her chest, it was not a power play so much as it was to comfort herself. She didn’t look all that threatening like this but he knew somewhere in his mind that he should be wary. “Dr. Cho created it to slow the heartbeat of speedsters. It was made for my-“
She sighed, looking away and then shaking her head, “You will regain feeling soon enough. I did not want you to zip away.”
“Why not?”
There had been a certain amount of openness about her before, when they were on the street. There was something so familiar and comforting about her then, but all of that just felt wrong now. It was gone. She was cold and closed off, and he was starting to panic.
It was unspoken among the few mutants that he’d met that their kind was starting to disappear. Mutants with physical manifestations were starting to cover up or go into hiding because you’d talk to a mutant with scales one day and then the next day, they were gone without a trace. People would say that it was the war, people were being drafted all the time but it wasn’t right.
He’d heard about Trask first from eavesdropping on Logan, then eavesdropping on Charles and Erik on the way to the airport. He knew that he was a bad man, that his suspicions that mutants were being taken was confirmed. Trask was killing them, torturing them, harvesting them for their powers to destroy the future but Trask was awaiting trial in a high security prison.
It didn’t mean that people were not still doing his bidding and this very white room that he was in certainly looked a lot like what he thought a mutant torture chamber would look like.
His aunt warned him about his powers, he should have listened.
“I told you not to panic,” Wanda said. “You are panicking.”
“Yeah, that happens when I’m drugged and kidnapped,” He snorted. “What do you want with me?”
“Who are you?” She asked, her face was a mask of indifference but her voice was demanding. “Who are you really?”
“I don’t have anything that you’d want.”
“I just want your name.”
“So you can threaten my family?” He asked. “Wanna kill them too? Torture them. I have on good authority that I am very annoying, I will be very, very annoying so you should just make it very quick.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” She stated. He did not believe her. “Or your family.”
He didn’t know what he had expected her response to be but he was unsettled by the fact that she did not seem to find his question unreasonable or surprising. She had answered it simply, honestly, and in a voice that made him think that she’d get his name from him one way or another.
“Do you promise that you won’t hurt them?”
“Yes.”
“Does your promise mean anything?”
“Yes.”
“Peter,” He finally answered. “It’s Peter, okay. Peter Maximoff. Let me go.”
She didn’t look away from where she was drilling holes into his retinas with a look that was lethal when she dropped his wallet into his lap, “This says Pietro Maximoff. It also says that you are in your sixties.”
“So this is the future?”
“That’s not your name.”
“What?”
“You are not Pietro Maximoff,” She snapped, her eyes flashing warningly red. “Why are you using his name?”
“Uhhh…” Peter trailed off. He felt an involuntary tick in his leg like he got when he was still for too long, the feeling was starting to come back. “I don’t know what to tell you, lady, I’m Peter. It was the seventies like ten minutes ago. I was running and, I don’t know, I got here but I do have things to do so just let me-“
“My name is Wanda.”
“Groovy.”
“Wanda Maximoff,” She told him. “My brother is Pietro and you are not him.”
“…How do you know about Wanda?” Peter asked, everything in him shifted. He’d been panicking before, rambling, and still a little snarky but all of that was gone now. He was angry, so was she.
The lights in the room flickered but neither acknowledged it.
“How do you know about her?” He demanded. “You better not fucking – if you even think about hurting her, I-“
Wanda’s hands flared red but she forced herself to simmer down when there was a tap on the one-way glass and then a voice coming from above in a feminine Irish accent, “Dr. Banner wishes to see both of you in his lab.”
“You stole my blood.”
“I would like to consider it more of borrowing,” The man – this “Dr. Banner” person– had replied casually. Peter found him to be very Hank-ish and not in the cool blue kind of way but in the mad scientist kind of way. He did not trust him and he did not trust secretive people from the future with his blood.
“You’re planning to return it to my body then?” He asked sarcastically, dropping into a chair at a table covered in a bunch of machinery parts. It looked more like Tinman’s stuff than this guys, but Peter didn’t mention it.
He had the feeling back mostly in one of his legs but it still felt as if he was walking on pins and needles while his other leg was almost completely useless. It was going too slowly. “Why did you take my blood?”
Once he got the feeling back than he was gone. He was going to take the blood and destroy all the evidence (and maybe a little more for kidnapping him). They couldn’t stop him, no one could.
“I asked him too.”
Peter shot a look that was dirty and full of betrayal at Wanda but she didn’t spare him a glance. She only had eyes for Bruce at the moment, “What did you find?”
“There are slight variations in the composition of his genetic makeup,” Bruce responded. “It is not a perfect match but it is very nearly. This is – he is Pietro but there are parts of him that is completely unique to him. There is – I’ve never seen DNA like this before. It is a mutation at the very basis of his base codes that-“
“Never seen a mutant before, doc?” Peter asked, it was still slow going to move but he was faster than any human on a normal day. He had the slide from the microscope and the vial of blood in his hands before he stumbled into a table on the opposite side of the room. “As honored as I am to be your first, I’d like to know what the hell is going on here?”
“That is what I’d also like to know.”
When Peter turned his head to the opening doors of the elevator, he was not shocked to find the cocky tin can from the street. He was smaller out of his suit, older than Peter thought he’d be, vulnerable but overly confident. He had some kind of electronic device in his hand, a tablet.
Future tech.
Neato.
“I’ve been reviewing trace readings in the area and – hey!”
“What is this, man?” Peter asked, flipping the tablet around in his hands. It was slick and thin like nothing he’d seen before. “Some Star Trek shit, man. Speaking of, where’s my Walk-“
“I fixed it,” Tony replied, tossing his Walkman back to him. “Fixed the batteries, better headphones. I made it more durable to higher velocities. You’re really from the seventies?”
“Uh, yep,” Peter nodded absentmindedly, trading his interest in the tablet for his Walkman. It looked brand new, there are a new cassette tape in it. “’73, Paris Peace Accords, Vietnam, Magneto dropped Kennedy Stadium on the White House. A few for the history books – dude, I don’t think half of these Pink Floyd songs even exist yet.”
“Magnet – what dropped what on the what?” Tony asked, ignoring Peter’s repeated response. “No, no that’s – we’ll deal with that later. The readings from the portal, they’re not of this world.”
“Asgardian?”
“Yes and no,” Tony responded to Bruce’s question, handing him the results. “The signatures are similar but all portals are wormholes to somewhere. This is-“
When Bruce looked up from the readings with surprise, Tony’s grin grew increasingly more manic, “You got it.”
“You’re saying that it’s a portal to-“
“Another dimension, yep.”
“Wait, are you telling me that I time traveled and am in a parallel universe?” Peter asked. “Groovy.”
“If he is Pietro than why does he not look like him?” Wanda asked, more of a demand than a question.
Bruce shrugged, “Well, there’s a million different possibilities for your genetic makeup. It’s all random, he is mostly Pietro but it’s not a perfect match. And-“
“I’m a mutant, yeah,” Peter rolled his eyes. “I’m also standing right here.”
He rolled his eyes again, this time slow enough that they all caught it, and then was zipping across the room. He had an Iron Man helmet in his hands now, tossing it back and forth at high speeds. At least he got the feeling back in his legs now, though he did think he would stick around for a little longer.
“Pietro-“
“Why do you keep calling me Pietro? It’s Peter.”
“Why don’t you have an accent?”
“Well, in my universe, a little thing called World War II uprooted a lot of families from their homelands,” He noted and then zipped away. He came back with a box of twinkies. “So, no accent. Are these things, like, discontinued in the future ‘cause they were hard to find?”
“For a while but the country collectively lost their shit over it so they brought them back.”
Peter nodded slowly at Tony’s words and then jabbed a finger at him, “I like you.”
He jabbed another finger at Wanda, “It’s Peter.”
“It is Pietro, our mother-“
“Well, she’s dead,” He said bluntly. They both reacted visually to the harshness of his words, Wanda reeling back like it stung her and Peter flinched hard. He was more subdue when he added, “Marya, my – our aunt, she calls me Peter. It’s Peter.”
“Dead?”
“Yeah, she – well, she’s dead and has been for a long time so, uh, I’m sorry. I guess.”
“How long?” Wanda asked and then when he was too slow to answer her, her eyes flashed red angrily and the palms of her hands started to glow, “How. Long.”
“Gee, like, almost ten years, man.”
“Since you were – you were ten.”
“Bingo,” He shrugged. “Sucks that you got math in this universe, too.”
“What about – this Magneto,” She continued, ignoring his rambling. “He is your – our dad? What is he like?”
“He’s a terrorist.”
“Oh hey, all the newspaper say the same about you, Wanda,” Tony said, oddly cheerful. “Like father, like daughter.”
“But, like, a real one,” Peter shrugged, ignoring Tony’s comment. “And a real dick and like, he probably, definitely killed JFK.”
“Hmm,” Tony hummed. “In this universe, JFK was shot by Cap’s amnesiac World War II POW boyfriend turn assassin.”
“…”
“…”
“Far out, dude,” Peter nodded. “You win, that might be weirder but Magneto tried to kill Nixon on national television. It was sooo groov- not groovy.”
Pietro – Peter.
Peter ran a lot, consistently, Wanda noticed. He ate a lot, too, and talked a lot… stole a lot. He was accumulating things, stacking them up on the kitchen counter in the amount of time it took her to make a cup of tea.
She didn’t think he was even aware that he was doing it. He’d just zip away, zip back, have something new and he’d make a comment about something else being similar between their DC and his.
“You ran to Washington DC?”
He had cake now, chocolate with chocolate icing and chocolate sprinkles. It was gone almost as fast as it was there, he shrugged, “I’m fast.”
“You are taking all of this well,” She stated. There was a scratch on his goggles that she hadn’t noticed before. “Being in an alternate reality, alternate reality twin.”
He shrugged, “I’ve seen weirder.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, well, you should meet my sister, total weirdo,” He replied and then laughed when she looked surprised and slightly offended for her alternate reality counterpart. “Yes! Wanda – my Wanda makes the same face. See, you don’t look that much like her but you’re like her. That’s great.”
The smile on his face was so bright and so full of a childish amount of awe and excitement that Wanda felt a stab of jealousy for her alternate reality self. He was different than Pietro, fiercely protective like her Pietro but so different. She could not help but wonder if this was what her brother would have been like if the weight of the world hadn’t crashed down on their ten year old shoulders.
Peter said that he lost his mother at that age, too, but he was dancing around the topic of how it happened. Wanda refused to tug on that string, she did not want to know.
“So, how am I like me?”
“Eh?” She asked, shaking her thoughts away. “Oh, uh, the kleptomania.”
Peter laughed.
“Are you paying for that stuff or stealing it?” She asked, though she knew the answer even before he shrugged. She pushed the Avengers credit card Tony gave her over to him. “Stop it.”
“I can’t take your money.”
“It is better than stealing,” She told him. “Don’t use your gift for petty theft.”
“You sound just like Wanda.”
“Because I am her,” She replied. “And I am willing to bet that in any possible universe out there that has us, this conversation will happen.”
“Ehh,” He shrugged. “My Wanda isn’t so sentimental.”
There was a crack and one of the legs on the chair below him snapped in half, he nearly ended up in another heap at her feet if he hadn’t been so fast. He sent her an approving look, “That’s more like my Wanda.”
Peter took it significantly less well when he was informed that they didn’t know how to return him to his universe.
He’d been on their Earth for nearly two full hours now. Though he claimed that he was quite enjoying the future, he had seen enough of it to know that other than slight variations and technological updates, there wasn’t much of a difference between their universes. At least not enough to keep him interested.
He needed to go home, he was looking for his sister.
It was Tony that broke the news.
The trace elements that they found of the portal had been exactly that, trace.
As well, it wasn’t like they were elements that were found in abundance on this planet and some didn’t even exist in this universe. Even if they knew how to open the portal, it was no telling where it’d send him.
Peter didn’t care.
“Open it.”
“It’s not possible, Boy George.”
He was gone in a flash, so fast that it took a while for his afterimage to dissipate. He didn’t zip back immediately, didn’t come back in a minute or two, or ten. Wanda called for F.R.I.D.A.Y.
“Mr. Maximoff has left the building, Ma’am.”
“Are you tracing him, F.R.I.D.A.Y. girl?” Tony asked.
“Yes, sir,” F.R.I.D.A.Y. answered. “The tracker you stuck on him is still functional at high speeds, sir.”
“You…you’re tracing my brother?”
“Yep.”
“Thank you.”
Peter could be traced using the tracker or by the calls of theft that have been reported all around New York. A shadow, a blur, stealing junk food and video games.
Wanda needed neither.
It was the force in the atmosphere, the taste of something almost electric in the air, and a pull she could not explain that told her that he was near. She knew it was him because she felt the same thing when Pietro rushed into a room.
She found him on the roof.
“Pietro.”
“It’s still Peter.”
“Sorry,” She apologized, stepping farther out onto the roof. He was sitting on the ledge, far too close to the edge for her liking. His jacket was tossed on the ground beside him and she noticed that his Deep Purple t-shirt had been replaced with a modern Led Zeppelin tee. It still had the price tag on it.
“The music in the future sucks.”
He hadn’t turned his head towards her but she could read the tension in his shoulders and stiff neck. He didn’t trust her and Wanda was surprised to find that it hurt a little. She turned her frown up quickly for fear that he might catch it, “Stark feels the same way.”
She took a step forward and then another one when he didn’t zip away. She was caution with each step she took towards him and did not stop until she was close enough to see that he was playing a hand-held video game. He’d stolen it.
Peter looked up at her sharply.
“Is that the same Tony Stark that killed our parents?” He asked bluntly, tossing down the Times magazine editorial on her. It had been Tony’s idea to separate her from Ultron.
She refused to let herself be caught off guard, “Yes.”
“How does a man that controls metal get crushed by a building?” Peter asked before answering his own question, “Easy. He’s not a mutant. Magneto’s powers came from a mutation and so do mine. Yours don’t.”
“No.”
“No, they really don’t,” He said almost with a laugh in his voice. “You know, World War II wasn’t that far off for me, for my family.”
“I know.”
“You volunteered to be experimented on by Nazis,” Peter stated, incredulous. He flipped angrily to the page in the magazine that discussed that very fact. “That’s pretty fucked up considering that we’re Jewish.”
Wanda allowed herself to flinched then. She offered him no words for an explanation, only missing his eyes when his tried to meet hers.
“If this was a movie than I bet the fans would be pretty pissed about that.”
“I know.”
“So, why you’d do it?” He asked. The anger in his voice that had been there a second ago was gone now, replaced with curiosity, but Wanda was not delusional enough to think that it was truly gone. She knew her Pietro, she imagined that this Peter was not that much different. “Must have been a good reason.”
“We were hungry,” She stated. “There was a war going on, the protests were becoming riots, mobs, and we were living on the street and starving. They – they offered food and shelter.”
“They’re Nazis.”
“They did not advertise themselves as such,” She replied, it was not an excuse as much as it was anger for not seeing through the ‘SHIELD agents’ for what they truly were. “It was a mistake.”
“Yeah, it was.”
Peter was not going to tell her that it was okay, he would not forgive her for it because he felt betrayed and the wound was still too open. She would not accept it anyways, she knew Pietro blamed himself for their capture. She suspected that Peter also blamed her brother.
“What happened to your Wanda?” She asked after letting the silence creep over them until it felt like it was suffocating. “Where did she go?”
“Wanda ran away,” He told her. His jaw was set in a way that made her think that running away was not the only thing that her alternate reality self was doing. “You probably understand why she ran better than I do but…she couldn’t control her powers. They aren’t like mine.”
“You know, I’m fast and my hair turned gray before I was thirteen,” He continued. “That’s like, the worst of it but Wanda… Things would just happen, would explode and break, and she was the cause of them. She couldn’t explain them, couldn’t stop it, and it just – she didn’t think it was safe to be home, that it drew too much attention to us so she started traveling until she could control her powers.
“I guess she didn’t figure it out because she never came home,” He said softly.
Wanda felt her heart grow heavy with both understanding and anger for her other self. She knew the powers were scary, she knew the damage they could inflect and the destruction that came when they weren’t controlled properly but she did not know how any version of her would leave her brother.
“I gave her time,” Peter said, he was not looking at Wanda but at the horizon. His hair was blowing in the wind, silver all the way to the root, and Wanda wondered for the first time how young this version of her brother was because he seemed so much younger than she felt. “I gave her space and now- there’s been this crackdown on mutants since the White House.”
He sighed, blinking hard, “There have been protest across the country, the world, about rounding up all of us ‘freaks’ and it’s starting to feel…Marya’s worried, more than usual. I need to find Wanda.”
“Mutants were going missing before,” He told her. “This guy, Trask, he was kidnapping them and experimenting on them, killing them. Mutants are still going missing and I just – I need to find her.”
“I don’t know why I’m here,” He finished lamely. “I don’t know how to get home and the – the freakin’ Avengers don’t know either.”
“You were looking for your – your me and I was looking for my brother,” Wanda said calmly. “It’s the power to manipulate probability. We found exactly what we were looking for just in a way that we were not expecting to.”
“…You did this?”
“I think so.”
There was something in Peter’s face that cracked the look of surprise there and then he was laughing, “Fucking course you did.”
Wanda couldn’t help but laugh as well.
“You said that you were looking for your me,” Peter said and Wanda’s laughter died on her lips. He noticed that immediately. “What happened to him?”
“He died,” She told him, “Saving the world.”
Wanda had refused.
Pietro had not died on the battlefield of Sokovia. He had not gone down in a hail of bullets like the pictures the newspapers painted, he did not die a hero’s death.
Pietro was carried off the field. He was laid among the dead and dying before taken into one of the operating rooms on the helicarrier and he died.
When their home had been blown to pieces, Pietro bled out onto white sheets. He died before reaching the Avenger’s medical center.
He died.
Their mother was found among the destruction, days after they started to clear it away, their father had not. Wanda still remembered being sat down in the orphanage, told that she had been mere feet from them, that her throat had been punctured by the debris. She died, suffocating on her own blood.
Pietro’s death was undignified just like their mother. It was not the way it should have been, it shouldn’t have happened. He shouldn’t have died. She did not want him to die.
She would not allow them to touch him.
She would not let any of them close to Pietro.
First, they took her parents and then stole her brother from her. They did not save him; they could not lay him to rest either.
She screamed the words at them, threw threats and hurled insults. She cried. She destroyed.
She held him in her arms, so tight to her chest, and she begged him to come back. She tried to bargain with the gods, with any god. Her prayers stayed unanswered and Pietro remained dead.
Ultron had been defeated, destroyed, and she crushed his heart in her hands because he had done the same to her. The pain remained, it would never go away.
Barton had been the first to brave her. He cleaned the blood off and dirt from her shaking hands and he made her eat, he brought up arrangements and funerals. She told him no. She told him to leave.
Pietro was not going into the ground. She would never allow her brother to be buried again. She refused to even consider the thought of a coffin, a burial. Once in a lifetime was enough.
He was staying, she told them.
She had refused a burial, she refused the very thought of a cremation. She would not go so far to even entertain the thought of turning him into a tree or shooting him into outer space. He was not going anywhere.
She did not care about the impracticalities.
She would not let him go.
Stark built a cryo-stasis chamber for Pietro and he laid peacefully inside of it. Sometimes, she could pretend that he was just sleeping. If she closed her eyes, she could pretend that it was just the two of them and he was zipping around her.
She visited often.
She told him everything.
Sometimes Clint was there when she came. She’d catch him talking about his baby, about his kids, about what a damn fool Pietro had been for taking a bullet for such an old man. Wanda told him one of those times that she did not blame him.
“I know, kid.”
“You should not blame yourself.”
“Neither should you.”
They were calling her the Scarlet Witch now, she sometimes told Pietro. She would add another Sudoku puzzle book to the growing stack of them beside the chamber, he’d always loved puzzles, and she would roll her eyes, “I do not know if it is an insult or not.”
She would tell him about her missions, about being an Avenger, and all the publicity that comes along with being one. She told him about Sokovia, that their people were reliant and rebuilding. She’d tell him about her nightmares, about the thing in silver and gray. She would just talk for hours, for days.
There were days when Wanda did not want anyone to see Pietro, there were days when she couldn’t enter the room and other days that she could not leave. She’d never brought someone with her but she brought Peter.
“So, this is me?”
She swallowed hard and then nodded. She couldn’t bring herself to step into the room so she stayed in the doorway. It was never going to get easier seeing him in there, seeing him so still, but having Peter here with her made it all feel too real.
Peter snorted, “I mean, sure, he has a six pack and like, muscles and he’s handsome but…lame.”
“You are handsome.”
“I’m not Mr. Male Model over here,” Peter said, gesturing to Pietro. Wanda noticed that he was also keeping his distance, she felt his apprehension creep into the air. Peter was uncomfortable. “Is it bad that this is creepy?”
“No.”
“Because, I mean, this is a whole new level of looking death in the face,” He stated, zipping around the room. Wanda would have worried about all of the wiring to the chamber if Peter wasn’t avoiding the machine altogether. “Can I ask a question?”
She shrugged, “Yes.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Holding on,” He stated. “He’s – he’s gone, Wanda. He would – I know that this isn’t what he’d want. I wouldn’t want this for my sister and I know that he wouldn’t want you not be living your life because of me – him.”
“I am living my life.”
“Really?” Peter asked, eyebrow raised. “So, when are you going to put the moves on the robot guy with the nice voice because you clearly have the hots for him and he is crazy about you.”
She glared, “I don’t have the hots for Vision.”
He rolled his eyes, “Yeah, sure.”
“I-“
“If you’re waiting for approval, I say go for it.”
“I do not need your approval.”
“No, but you want it,” He stated with more insight than Wanda thought possible. “But not mine, no. You want his and you’re never going to get it. He’s gone.”
“No, he isn’t.”
“Wanda,” Peter said after a moment. “He looks pretty dead right now.”
Her eyes flashed in defense with red and it was as if she’d read his fast-paced thoughts because the very next thing she was doing was shoving him against the wall with all the strength her powers could muster without killing him. The plaster cracked and crumbled around him. “Do. Not. Touch. Him.”
“The tracer says that Speedy is right – what is going on here?”
Wanda had been distracted just enough by the elevator opening behind her for Peter to build up enough friction to force himself free of her hold. The room was small, he was limited in his space and speed, and Wanda was more powerful than him in any universe but Peter knew how to play to his strengths.
He processed everything faster than others and he was fast. Wanda worked in probabilities so all Peter had to be was as unpredictable as he always was and dodge her energy blast.
Peter was not in the habit of being unnecessarily cruel but if it was him, he would not want to be wasting away in a see-through grave/chamber/thing and he sure as hell did not want his sister sitting by his side wasting her life. He did not allow himself to feel anything but relief when he ripped away the cryo-chamber’s wires.
The scream that escaped Wanda’s lips was unholy, broken, and it shook the room so suddenly and hard that Peter was knocked off his feet. Her eyes were ablaze with red fire and the room lit up with the glow. Her hands looked as if they were burning when she stalked towards him.
The solution in the chamber was almost completely drained now.
“H-Hey, Wanda, let’s not-“
She silenced him, forcing him to the floor with her powers, “You killed him.”
“He was already dead,” Peter said and then hissed as she pressed down farther. There was a pressure against his chest and his throat, as if he was being crushed. Wanda advanced on him, her eyes nothing but red.
“You killed him,” She repeated. Her voice was haunted with hurt, pain, anger. Peter, for maybe the first time in her life, wished he would have thought through what he’d decided to do.
“Wanda, I don’t think-“
The door slammed shut on Tony’s words with a flick of Wanda’s wrist and it would not budge regardless of what tech Tony had. She turned her attention back to Peter. He was struggling to get to his feet.
She shoved him against the wall with her powers. He choked out, “You won’t kill me.”
“You are not my brother,” She hissed. “You killed him.”
“He was already dead.”
The wall groaned with his weight as he was pushed farther into it. Peter wanted to laugh, wanted to hiss in pain and curse her, but mostly, he wanted to point out to her that while this definitely sucked and it was uncomfortable, she was not hurting him.
She wouldn’t.
He had opened his mouth to say this but all he managed was a gasp. His jaw fell open, “Wanda.”
“How could you-“
“Turn around.”
Wanda shoved him farther and the wall cracked more under him. He felt a weight against his throat again, pushing harder than before, “I – can’t…breathe.”
She did not let up this time but then there was a hand on her shoulder and when she expected to see red and purple, mechanical and warm, she did not. She found long thin hands, pale and cold, a scar on the pinkie from a jagged piece of glass, “Pietro.”
Peter stumbled to his feet when suddenly the power was no longer holding him there. Wanda turned her back onto him, gasping and pinching herself, “This is real life.”
Pietro smiled, looking worse for wears but alive and breathing, and he – “You’re real. You’re really here.”
“Really here,” Pietro spoke, his voice was rough with disuse, his white hair was tinged with a stain of orange from the solution in the cryo-chamber. He was alive, he was real. Wanda hugged him as tight as she could. He hugged back.
“Who is this?”
Peter gave him a wave, “You from a parallel universe, dude.”
“Eh?”
“Exactly,” Peter put his hand on his hips and then checked his throat with probing fingers before he ripped the door open for Tony. “Is Zeppelin still kicking ass in the future or what, man?”
“Wait until you hear AC/DC,” Tony responded, his voice was rather uplifting but his eyes were glued on the twins. Peter supported his head so he wouldn’t get whiplash and then they were in Tony’s lab.
“Look after her.”
“Of course,” Pietro replied easily. “And you find my sister, yes.”
“My sister,” Peter warned him. “Your Wanda is awesome, you don’t get two cool Wandas. Why don’t you don’t do something stupid, like die again.”
Pietro could appreciate his own sense of humor, “Yes, I will try.”
“And listen to some Pink Floyd, man.”
“I will,” Pietro held his hands up in surrender. “Find your Wanda.”
“As soon as yours puts me back in my universe.”
Wanda rolled her eyes. As happy as she was to have Pietro back and as thankful as she for Peter for figuring out that her brother only needed time in stasis to heal, she was could not deal with two overprotective brothers.
Pietro was the one that put all the pieces together after he got the whole story. His first question had been, “Why don’t you just try to open a portal again by looking for the you in that universe?”
And then, of course, that conversation quickly turned into a race to see who was faster while she worked with Tony and Bruce to figure out how to open a portal to an alternate universe.
She was sad to see Peter go but she wanted him to find his sister and, “Please be safe.”
“I’ll try.”
“And stop stealing.”
“I won’t try that.”
“And be careful with that Magneto guy,” She told him. “I don’t trust him.”
Peter laughed, “That’s two of us, sis.”
“And be patient with me,” She told him. “She was young with immense power and she was scared. You have every right to be angry but please, be patient with her.”
Peter was soberer than before when he told her, “I will. Promise.”
Wanda tapped into the universe and she focused all of her thought and energy into finding herself in Peter’s universe, so much so that she felt as if she could see her, feel her. She felt a sudden wave of anger that was different than hers but also so similar, fear, and a rush of power that she knew had to be her alternate universe self. She focused on it until it was the only thing in her universe.
When the portal open, Peter took a deep breath and adjusted his goggles and then, he ran.
His landing was a little better than it had been the first time. He had stumbled but he managed to stay into his feet, steadying himself out.
He heard a shuffle behind him and when he spun around, the portal was gone and in its place, “Wanda.”