:v the pietro after cw stuff ? ;u;
Send me fic prompts!
AO3 Mirror.
i.Pietro wakes and feels the air close and still around him. His heart is already racing - hummingbird fast, Wanda called it. He stretches out shaking hands, feels the space around him and laughs.
A coffin. He is in a coffin.
He batters his hands against the lid. He chokes on the soil dust for a moment, pulls his shirt up over his mouth and nose and tries again.
His hands crack through the wood, soil cascading down and he pushes up to it, desperately clawing for air.
It is dark and cool but so much brighter and fresher than the coffin. Pietro slumps on the grass, still half in the soil, and breaths in the fresh air.
He can feel tight scar tissue on his chest where Ultron’s bullets hit him (killed him) but he’s alive now.
Pietro rolls over, laughs into the night and watches the stars until he can stand.
ii.A year. It has been a whole year where Wanda as been without him. A whole year that he has been dead gone.
Pietro showers in the empty house he’d broken into, scrubs himself clean of grave dirt. When he steps out steam has gathered on the mirror and windows, on the metal fittings. He dries himself roughly with a towel, pulls on clean clothes.
He’s been gone a whole year.
His first job, before anything, is finding where Wanda is.
iii.“Uh, Clint?” Sam’s voice is wary. “Can you c’mere a sec?”
There’s the noise of shuffling feet, a muted, “It’s all right, kid, I’ll be right back.”
Clint looks exhausted but that’s no surprise. Wanda’s nightmares have been waking them all since the Raft, and with with Clint’s sense of debt to her he’s been caught in the blast more often than not.
“What is it?” Clint asks. Sam sees him barely stifle a yawn.
Sam waves a hand at the screen in front of him. “News.”
Clint reads:
In The Wake Of Avenger’s Battle At Leipzig Anti-Super Sentiment High
Captain America Exhibit Defaced
Hard Questions Brought To Billionaire Tony Stark
And there, right at the bottom:
Pietro Maximoff’s Body Stolen From Grave
Clint looks aghast. “Who...?”
“I don’t know,” Sam says. “But Wanda-”
“Is not in a place for this.”
iv.Pietro scours the news for his sister and then the net. If she knew he was here - if she was nearby - her mind would be a bright scarlet beacon to guide him home.
But she isn’t here; she doesn’t know he’s back.
His sister was locked up in a secret prison and now she’s vanished.
v.There are instincts, there to guide them when all hope is lost.
In the end, these instincts always led them back to each other.
vi.He goes to the new Avengers’ base first. Stark is there and his friend and the android. Vision seems pensive, worried, Stark seems laden with guilt for his friend.
Wanda’s room is empty and quiet as a grave.
vii.Pietro goes to Sokovia next, to Novi Grad. Except: it isn’t Sokovia any longer but Latveria, and under von Doom’s rule the crater has become a metropolis to rival America’s.
He searches, but finds no sign of his sister there.
viii.By the old castle Pietro thinks and considers.
A place acting as home. A place which had always been home. Pietro wonders if there was a place that had been offered as home.
He becomes a blur of blue and returns to America.
ix.The archer, he thinks, might have felt guilty for his death in the archer’s stead. Certainly had children.
In Stark’s files he finds a Barton Farm, the details of how to keep the family there secret and safe.
Pietro heads for Iowa.
x.The farm is loud and full but empty of it’s father and his sister. There are traces of her though - a scarlet shawl in the spare bedroom, a set of earrings in the bathroom.
When he looks at the scattered notepaper on the desk he sees an angrily etched Star of David that was drawn with all of his sister’s precision.
xi.No sign. Not anywhere.
But he cannot give up his search.
xii.Wanda finds out eventually. Her nightmare-clawing mind seeps into theirs and sees what they hid from her.
Wanda’s furious grief is almost as strong as at Novi Grad.
xiii.He is dreaming when it happens. The bright bleak blue of his mind, his dying tree, stark silver winds of thought moving ever faster.
And suddenly he is bathed in scarlet light - a red like blood.
Sister, he thinks, and knows she needs him.
He wakes, orients himself, and runs.
xiv.The tech here is beyond Stark’s. The country is beyond words, bright and beautiful.
Pietro doesn’t care. Pietro runs on and seeks his sister.
xv.He is a hallucination. He is a ghost. He’s a conjuring of her powers, he is anything but here-
And he takes her in his arms and Wanda starts to sob.
xvi.They hear Wanda’s startled, desperate scream, but no stretching scarlet fingers scrape through their minds.
Then the scream is choked off, and they take off running.
xvii.“I’ve got you,” Pietro is whispering when they arrive. “I have you. I’ve got you. No one is going to do that to you ever again.”
There is something absolute in his tone, something certain in his gaze and his eyes - bright and blue - are as half-mad and utterly terrifying as Wanda’s scarlet ones.
“The next person to hurt you,” Pietro whispers in his sister’s ear, “I will kill for you.”
xviii.Wanda does not stop shaking for hours, Pietro does not leave her. Sam, after a while, jogs off to tell Steve.
Steve’s face, when he arrives, is as shocked as when he’d seen Bucky on the bridge.
xix.Wanda sleeps, her head resting in her brother’s lap. Pietro’s fingers comb through her hair, his other hand clasped with hers.
The twins together, unsundered, once more a single unit against the world.
“Pietro,” Clint says softly from the doorway. “What happened?”
xx.There is rage in Pietro, curling in his belly as Wanda curls around him. He wants to express it, let it burn out of him like fire or Wanda’s scarlet.
His fingers comb through Wanda’s hair.
He will not burn and rage, yet. Wanda is sleeping peacefully and Pietro would see her remain so.
So he speaks in a voice like winter.
“You all failed my sister.” He mulls over the words, combs his hand through Wanda’s hair. “Stark failed us long ago. The Captain put his friend before everyone, before even consideration and compromise. Barton dragged her into this, Ross dragged her to the Raft.”
He closes his eyes, sighs, combs his fingers through his sister’s hair.
“If you fail her again,” Pietro whispers, “I will kill you all.”
He is so absolutely, deadly calm that none of them doubt him.
xxi.Wanda wakes without nightmares. She rolls, and finds her face pressed to her brother’s knees. His hand is still tangled in her hair.
“Pietro,” she breathes, and it feels as though some dead part of her has returned to life.
“Wanda.” His voice is soft and fervent and unmistakably his. His hand untangles her hair. “Wanda I’m so sorry.”
xxii.She could never blame him not ever, she sees the shadow of guilt in his mind and plucks it up in scarlet hands.
Her hand cups his cheek.
“You came back,” she says. “You don’t have to say sorry for anything.”
xxiii.Not even for vengeance?
It is clear as crystal in his mind, who is blame and how. Who to hurt and in what ways. What it will take to wreak vengeful justice on all those who hurt his sister.
Wanda might absolve him of all blame but they were twins, halves of each other.
The rest of the world has no such guarding fortune.
