Chapter Text
Wanda Maximoff was no stranger to grief. It came like the tide and washed over her until her lungs burned.
As often as it came, it was never to take her away from the world, but to take, and take, and take from hers.
When she closed her eyes, she could envision the last time it felt like this.
“Wanda…” that soft, mechanical voice murmured, almost breathless as if he had lungs to breathe. “If you stay here, you’ll die…”
“I just did,” she had whispered, her eyes wet and red. “Do you want to know how it felt?”
Her fingers arched slowly, rhythmically, and wisps of scarlet coiled around her until it suffocated him, the pain in his mechanical, robotic body causing him to flinch with a ragged inhale as if he were a living, breathing man.
When she clenched her fist, his heart, dripping with oil rather than blood, was forced out of his chest and into her palm.
“It felt,” Wanda had started, quiet and low as her accent curved her words. “Like that.”
Because Pietro was dead. He was dead, and half of her soul had been ripped from her chest the moment he collapsed on the streets of her homeland, and their connection was severed. She had felt every bullet tear through her body as if it had been her own.
Wanda opened her eyes now, but she wasn’t looking down at the mechanical body of Ultron. She was holding the love of her life. And he was dead because she had killed him. She killed him. She killed him. He was dead because she killed Vision—No. No. No.
Everything she had done had been erased the moment Thanos twisted his gauntlet, and the time stone glowed a vibrant emerald. In that instance, Vision was brought back with a gasp, seconds before the titan grabbed him by the neck, his hand kindred to a noose.
He’d taken hold of the mind stone, and he crushed Vision’s skull to separate the stone—to separate a piece of himself—from his body.
Her eyes went red. Power overcame her. When she stood, apprehension consumed Thanos’ expression as a crest of scarlet settled over the crown of her head.
His fist tightened, and he stepped back into a portal of smoke, disappearing entirely.
When he was gone, Wanda choked on a breath and fell to her knees before Vision as she pulled his lifeless form into her lap, into her arms. All she could do was heave a sob, her hands—her murderous, cruel hands—clutching his body.
All of her power, and even she could not bring him back.
Agony coated her throat like honey, sinking into her lungs until she gagged on it. Distantly, she knew rage would soon follow—but not now. Now, she could only cry, the loss of him becoming a cavity in her chest.
Around them—around her, and only her, because Vision was dead—the echoes of war were drowned out by her shaking hands, her breath stuttering in her chest as she cried.
It had been many years since she’d been a willing soldier of any capacity, but she always did what she could. But not now. Now she couldn’t stop trembling, even as the battle continued without her. She didn’t care. The passage of time hadn’t been on her mind since Thanos turned it back.
Wanda felt the distinctive shift in the atmosphere when it came. Wanda was aware of it, and she did nothing to stop it.
Pain found her, next, eating away at her flesh as dust became her. Even in that ache, that unbearable agony that consumed her, all Wanda could do was tip her head back to the sky with relief.
And like Vision, she, too, was gone.
When consciousness greeted her, so did sharp, blinding nausea as she returned to her body, just as her body returned to the Earth. As she came back to herself, overwhelmed by anguish, Wanda remembered.
Her hands were cold and empty—Vision was gone. When she looked around, her chest and throat were far too tight as she suppressed a sob. He was gone. Even his body was gone.
The forest floor was gone, and so was the thick, dry atmosphere of Wakanda—instead it had been replaced with the stench of smoke, the air too cold and thin—like she was too high up to inhale enough oxygen.
Her body ached, as if she were out of place from herself—as if she’d just been torn apart, and painstakingly stitched whole again. It was as if every cell in her body had collapsed like a bright star seconds before igniting and detonating into a nebula.
When she tried to sit up, she recoiled in pain and looked down at herself.
Gone was her burgundy uniform and long coat; instead, she found a dark, knee-length dress paired with ripped tights and heavy black boots. A familiar maroon jacket had been pulled over her shoulders, the sleeves clasped at her forearms—fresh with Natasha’s perfume, as it had been when she first slipped it on in place of her old carmine shawl. Rings adorned her fingers, her nails coated with chipping charcoal polish. Without thought, Wanda’s hand went to her neck, as if expecting to find a gauntlet squeezing her throat, and only found necklaces layered over her clavicle and sternum.
Every inhale was a sharp gasp, pain searing through her body like she didn’t belong within herself.
Her hands were shaking, but she couldn’t make herself still when she didn’t know where she was, aside from on the ground.
Beneath her, the foundation shuddered as fractures shot through the stone until it began to erode underfoot as if God’s hand slid beneath the city and into its roots so He could easily pluck it from the Earth.
Around her, Wanda recognized nothing, only aware that she was somewhere with crumbling stone structures and distant screams of fear and confusion that echoed through her mind as if everything had been unbearably amplified.
Wanda couldn’t think, or focus—she could only heave a breath, and curl her fingers into fists until her nails bit uncomfortably into her skin. But she was numb to it, as unconscious threads of red floated around her skin.
Wherever she was, Wanda was undeniably not alone. She knew Thanos must have gotten each stone and used them. Surely, if she had been reduced to dust, so had everyone else.
But why was she back?
Her breath caught on a sudden, choked sob. Why couldn’t she just die?
The scarlet that radiated from her fingertips dulled into thin air when her body nearly gave out, nausea rising again, her vision blurring as if the world had just tilted on its axis while she tried to stand. And then—
A limp, half-destroyed robotic corpse began dragging itself up a stone step, near her, and her knees buckled with agonizing, paralyzing fear.
A kind she hadn’t felt since she was a child.
She must have fallen unconscious—fallen into the depths of her own twisted, nightmare-infested mind.
Because in front of her was one of the many bodies of Ultron, and that meant—
Light spun around her so quickly that Wanda briefly thought she was caught staring up into an explosion of stars—but then the silver blur of light ripped through the Sentry, a rush of wind following as the machinery was torn apart entirely until only wires sparked as metal hit the ground.
Immediately, the light stilled in front of her.
No. No, Wanda had not fallen unconscious. She was not dreaming. Instead, surely she was dead. That was what the titan had planned—the decimation of the universe, and her own life with it. She was dead, and the reprimand for the atrocities she’d committed was to spend an eternity living the day her life ended, over and over again.
She was reminded again of the distant screams—and it made sense, now, that she was hearing tormented cries in a language she hadn’t spoken in so long, but a language she was born knowing.
Sokovian.
She was home again.
And her brother, with his bright, ash-white bangs hanging messily over his forehead before he shoved his hand through them while he caught his breath, stood in front of her.
“Hey,” her twin called, Sokovian rolling off his tongue so fluently and easily, that it made her ache—it was so familiar, yet it had been so long that it nearly sounded foreign to her. Her chest seized at the overwhelming betrayal that she would be so unused to hearing his voice.
But for two years, eleven months, and twenty-six days, she had gone without it. It was something she counted, almost unconsciously, and spent every second of every day knowing that part of herself had been severed and had died on the streets of Sokovia with him. Part of herself had been left in their home country, long after his body had been taken with them to America to be buried, while she, selfish and cruel, started a new life without him. Without her twin.
Her throat felt raw, and her eyes stung.
“Wanda?” Her twin questioned, stepping closer as his gaze scanned her, expecting to find an injury to explain her silence.
Wanda looked like a specter of herself, with pale, hollow cheeks streaked with tears, her damp eyes burning, her irises tinged with unmistakable traces of red.
“Yeah,” she mumbled back in English, her voice hoarse as she held back fresh, exhausted tears. Even to her own ears, her voice was nearly incomprehensible with her shallow breathing and heavy accent—
Within the first several months of becoming an Avenger, Natasha taught her to utilize English more fluently, concealing her heritage until it was an unconscious decision to disguise the lilt in her voice.
At the time, she and Natasha connected over English being a second language—and it was a good distraction from the all-consuming grief that constantly threatened to swallow her whole because time did not heal all wounds. Wanda intimately knew that. Even now, it physically pained her to say his name.
Finally, Wanda managed, but she only did so because he was standing in front of her, concern etched in his brow.
Even if he were nothing more than a ghost, Wanda refused to let her brother worry over her.
“Yeah, Piet. I’m alright,” she breathed shakily, only managing to stay on her feet when she closed her eyes. He took half a step forward on instinct, the rubble crunching underfoot—she wasn’t ready for that yet. Wanda wasn’t ready to feel her hand slide through his as if he wasn’t there—because he wasn’t—she wasn’t ready to wake up. Not yet. Instead, she shook her head to wave him off, her eyes fluttering open again with great effort. “I just… need a minute.”
In response, her brother, her very much alive and caring brother, gave her a look that made something within her feel like a child again, watching as their mother gave their father the same look. That look, the slight lift of the brows, the narrowing of those familiar eyes. A look that could be passed in a dozen different circumstances, from teasing to utter disbelief. As if something was just outright ridiculous.
“You may be the one of us who can read minds,” Pietro drawled, not bothering to join her switch to English. “But I can read you.”
She couldn’t help how the edges of her lips lifted, or her eyes crinkled in the corners. Her expression only faltered again when another Sentry dropped from the sky behind him, and Wanda’s hand tightened into a fist on instinct. Scarlet bloomed and curled around her, and the Sentry’s chest caved from within before it crumpled to the ground, the pale blue power lines of its eyes and metal seams going dark.
Pietro glanced over his shoulder before his attention flickered back to her. His brow arched, his eyes following the steady wisps of red at her hands, which she hadn’t moved, up to her forehead, where that faint crown of scarlet had settled above her brow.
He didn’t question it yet, not as dozens more Sentries crawled up the streets and crumbling sides of buildings nearby.
Wanda glanced at her twin, and two years, eleven months, and twenty-six goddamn days were gone in a second.
He stepped forward, in front of her, until Wanda’s palm slid to his and squeezed. Her twin was unmovable, his hand steady and solid in hers, as it had been all the days of their life before this moment.
He was there.