My response to all the "Fixing-it" fics.

The author respectively warns the reader to gather tissues as she prepares to be keelhauled.

Miracles

Clint's shoulder was beginning to ache sharply, joining all the other little pains that alternatively stung, pounded, burned, and throbbed throughout his body.

"Do you need medical, Agent Barton?"

Clint waved away the concerned ex-SHIELD agent with a flick of his wrist and a barely contained grunt of pain. He would wait until the rest of his team got aboard before assessing his own injuries. He was still breathing, at least.

Almost involuntarily his eyes flickered once again to the lifeless body of Pietro Maximoff lying on the floor beside him. Clint clenched his teeth until his jaw ached. Someone hadn't even bothered to shut the kid's eyes yet. Just a kid. He'd been just a kid.

Clint swallowed passed the bile collected in the back of his throat and rolled onto his shoulder, placing a gentle finger to each of Pietro's eyelids in turn.

Just a kid.

He felt somehow as if he was supposed to apologize, although lord knows the boy couldn't hear him now. Clint had, just moments ago contemplated ending this life on his own. In jest, maybe, but still. What gave Clint the right to deal out death and life? What made his life more worth saving than Pietro's?

The helicarrier was abuzz with activity. SHIELD personnel were racing across the metal corridors, heels clanking against the hollow floor, speaking into radios that alternatively buzzed with static or muffled voices on the other end of the signal. The monstrous motors churned beneath the floor, rattling bits of loose machinery and making Clint's fingers vibrate beside him.

Clint had fully expected to die this round. The odds had been stacked against him. He had said his good-byes, held Laura in his arms, memorized the smell of her perfume, kissed his children and buried their trusting faces somewhere deep within him, never to be reached again.

"How you holding up?"

Clint looked up to see Natasha standing above him, red curls spilling over her ears and onto her forehead, face stained with dirt and ash but otherwise unscathed.

"Alright," Clint sighed, nodding. He realized his hand was still on Pietro's forehead, still face paled so that the stains of dirt and blood stood out sharply on his white skin. He pulled his hand away from the kid's face and laid it across his chest, a move he knew was not lost on Natasha, whose own eyes lingered for a moment upon their dead comrade before again turning to Clint.

"How'd it happen?"

"Pushed me out of the way of Ultron's guns. I was about a second away from lying where he is now."

Natasha nodded tautly, face unmoving. "We won't tell Laura the details."

Clint managed a weak smile before shutting his eyes again. God, he was tired. He heard Natasha walk away and her voice, possibly speaking to Hill, "Any word from Banner, yet?"

He wondered if he might be able to get some sleep. He doubted it. Pain and flashing memories of the battle were still nagging too persistently at his mind. His heart still hammered too deeply with excess adrenaline leftover from the fight to find any rest.

He couldn't shake the look on Pietro's face, stark surprise seeping into his silver eyes, widened with disbelief to raw yet to register pain. Didn't see that coming. Clint had. Clint had seen it all coming. His only hope had been that perhaps his own body might shield the boy in his arms, who might have been anyone's son, as small and warm as Cooper. Clint didn't know if that made him a hero, being ready to die for a child. In this moment he couldn't see how any of this made any of them heroes.

With his eyes still shut, Clint heard the pair of footsteps on the floor and then the light thump as whoever it was set their burden on the floor beside them. By the slight swish of fabric Clint could tell it was another person.

"Wanda, your brother –" It was Vision's voice, with only a hint of a grainy mechanical sound to it, but as gentle as any human's.

What made you human? Blood, a beating heart? Or did it take more, a combination of emotion and intelligence, incomplete lest they held an aptitude for both grief and hate? Was it the ultimate irony that this artificial being, made from metal and bolts as much as flesh, should be more human than any of them?

Clint's eyes snapped open. He propped himself up on his elbows so he could see them better. Vision was standing beside Wanda, his red skin casting a scarlet shadow across her face. Her face was motionless but hardly calm. To Clint it appeared as though she had simply stopped feeling any emotion at all. In an instant Clint realized she already knew, perhaps had known since the very moment it had happened.

Her voice came in a whisper, lips hardly moving, sounding more robotic than Vision, himself, as she asked, "Where is he?"

Steve tossed his shield down on a nearby swivel chair, relishing the clatter of metal that did nothing to satiate his strange urge to kick the chair across the room or otherwise rip something apart but, rather, only seemed to heighten it.

He could hear Natasha's voice behind him, speaking into a transmitter to Banner, "Hey big guy. We did it. The job's finished. Now I need you to turn this bird around, okay?"

His eyes landed on Vision as the android walked onto the bridge, Wanda looking incredibly tiny in his red-skinned arms. Vision gently set Wanda on her feet beside him. For a moment she tottered and Steve clenched his calf muscles, ready to dive forward and catch her if she collapsed.

"Wanda, your brother –" said Vision.

Wanda's eyes were chillingly empty as they raked the helicarrier's bridge. "Where is he?"

Steve saw Clint stir from where he was lying, on a metal ledge above Pietro, lying lifeless on the floor looking almost obscenely young. The archer pushed himself into a sitting position. The movement attracted Wanda's attention and she flew forward, knees hitting the metal floor with two thumps and a strangled sob in her throat.

"We can't track you in stealth mode. So help me out. I need you to turn around –" Natasha's voice was cut off abruptly from behind him and Steve turned from the sight of Wanda's hair splayed across Pietro's chest to find the Black Widow's surprisingly tear-filled eyes trained on Steve.

"He – hung up," she whispered. She looked…lost, an expression Steve had never before seen cross Black Widow's face and for a breath he felt his skin prickle with a deep, resonating chill. In that moment, heart thumping heavily in his stomach, Wanda lying across the still, cold body of her dead brother, it didn't seem as if they had won anything at all.

Steve wondered if it had been worth it. This sense of loss, of defeat. What, really, had been gained by their resistance? For a wild moment it was as though Steve could see into Ultron's mind. He was right. He was right. Humans couldn't possibly be worth saving, not when they were capable of reeking such chaos, such indifferent hate and hurt onto one another.

Steve turned at the sound of heavy feet clanging on the floor and saw Tony and Thor appear in the entranceway. Tony was grinning, Thor absentmindedly swinging his hammer at his side.

"Well," said Tony, "now that that's all wrapped up, I think this calls for another stop at that shawarma joint. What do you think, Steve?"

Steve looked away from Stark's smiling face, eyes falling again on Wanda, now rocking jerkily back and forth on her heels, muttering something under her breath that sounded almost like a prayer, or maybe they were just muffled tears.

"Shut up, Stark," he muttered.

Tony's mouth dropped into a perfect circle of comprehension as his own eyes fell on the brother and sister and he mercifully fell silent.

"Begging your pardon, Tony Stark," said Vision unexpectedly, eyes also fixed on Wanda and her brother, unexpected tenderness in his mechanical blue eyes. Steve wondered if the android could feel human emotions, or if they could be accessed with a mere flick of a switch inside the tangled wires that made up his nervous system, disregarded totally or chosen to be suffered. "But it would not seem that everything is, indeed, all wrapped up." He then looked up and found Steve's eyes, "I ask you for my leave. I have one more job to see done."

Steve didn't know if Vision was asking for some sort of formal decision, or why he was asking for it from Steve, but he nodded his consent anyway and the android turned on his heel, cape fluttering after him as he walked. It then occurred to Steve that he was still supposed to be the leader. Funny that Vision should still acknowledge that when even Steve himself had forgotten it.

"Are we not missing someone?" said Thor, turning his head so his locks of blond hair floated across his shoulders. "Where is the mighty Hulk?"

"He's – gone," said Natasha. She seemed to be having trouble speaking. She shut her eyes for only an instant and her chest expanded as she breathed deeply. When she opened her eyes again they were clear and completely dry, the rest of her face once again transformed into a curtain of almost defiant indifference. "Quinjet's in stealth mode. We can't track him."

Steve wanted to say something comforting, but his words were lost in the tight dryness of his throat. Maybe there weren't any words to be said at all. He breathed deeply and looked away from Natasha. His eyes were once again drawn – like some kind of perverted magnet – to Wanda and Pietro. The girl was trembling now.

Clint was sitting above her, knees inches from her head. He was staring at the pair of them intently, eyes having never left her bowed head. Steve wondered if the archer felt guilt for the boy's death. He shouldn't. Steve wanted to tell Clint that it wasn't his fault but, again, there were no words. No words. Dammit, there were never any words.

Steve realized abruptly that Clint's hard, penetrating eyes were glimmering red. In fact, Wanda's whole body seemed to be pulsing with the color.

It was then that Steve realized that the floor beneath his boots was growing warm.

Natasha stared without blinking at the red light on the comm unit that had suddenly gone out, indicating her voice was no longer reaching Banner, wherever he might be. Sorrow and anger swirled in equal parts within her gut but the emotion that rose with most prevalence she identified as disappointment. At last – at last it had seemed like something, anything, might have been set in the cards to go her way but then, of course –

She felt Steve's eyes on the back of her head and she turned to meet him. "He – hung up." Her mouth moved. Her voice came out, sounding quiet, almost confused, desperate, as if she somehow expected Steve to have the answer. It was then that she realized her eyes were burning with tears.

She tossed her head away from Steve so he wouldn't look at her anymore, feeling her hair brush her cheeks. She focused on breathing deeply, in feeling her chest rise and fall, disgusted by her weakness.

Why did it matter? What did she care? Everyone left. Everyone left eventually. Why had she thought this might be different? Everyone left, dammit. Everyone left.

Natasha fought back the choking, acidic tasting lump that had risen in her throat. Behind her she could hear Wanda crying over her dead brother.

So many people died. Natasha had watched so many people die, countless by her own hand. She did not deserve to be loved, monster that she was, incapable of creation, only destruction and why had she ever allowed herself to think any different? The Red Room had unmade her, destroyed fully the child they had rescued from the burning house and risen a monster in its place. Natasha had perhaps had a chance to walk away from that, but she had turned her back on any other future – any possible future with him – when she had chosen to stay and fight.

And what did it matter? What did any of it matter when people still died?

Her mind flew back to the guest bedroom at Clint's house, a place she had stayed many times but had somehow been transformed by Bruce's unfamiliar, heavy presence, like a weight pressing in the space between Natasha's ribs.

"You can choose whatever you'd like, Natasha." His voice was hypnotic, almost noxious, as sickly sweet as any narcotic. "To stay or go, to kill or show mercy, what to do, where to stay, how to live –"

"Who to love?" she interrupted him, finding his bleary, liquid brown eyes, tinged pink at the corners from lack of sleep.

He paused, for a moment, corner of his lip pulling upward before it dropped just as quickly into a straight line. "Or to love at all."

Now Natasha realized it, staring at the empty light, the expanse of cloud and smoky sky spilling in front of the hellicarriar's windscreen. What was love? What did Natasha know of love? No. It had not been love she had yearned for, had not been love she had asked of him. She was not searching for love. She had given up on love long ago.

She would have settled for necessity. Perhaps – did she dare hope? – merely contentment. To find some kind of shelter in his arms, to be given at least once the choice to leave –

She breathed deeply until her lungs couldn't hold any more air and she felt lightheaded. She could hear Stark, than Vision, than Thor asking where Banner was and –

"He's – gone." And Steve was looking at her again and Natasha shut her eyes to keep him from dissecting the emotions swimming in her irises and seeing inside her, picking her apart, unmaking her until everything spilled onto the metal floor of the bridge. She repeated the words in her mind, incessantly so that she might believe them. He's gone. He's gone. Gone. Gone. Gone.

When she opened her eyes again her lashes left traces of water on her cheeks but there didn't seem to be any more danger of further tears. She could hear her heartbeat in her ears, thudding urgently but evenly against her ribs.

With a rush like a vacuum the bridge went silent, all conversation, even breathing, seemed to cease, leaving nothing but the scattered beeping and whirring of different machinery. Natasha saw that all eyes were now trained on Wanda, covering Pietro's body with her own.

Wanda was shaking.

Clint was leaning over her, hand suspended half-way between his knee and her shoulder, as if he was reluctant to touch her.

Wanda was glowing red, a pulsing, glimmering, growing brightness that spilled from her hands and hair, casting her dead brother's face in a rippling shadow of scarlet. Red rimmed their two bodies, spilling across the floor like blood, but Natasha realized it was only light, or energy, or heat turning the metal floor to molten fire. It seemed, as she watched Wanda's violently trembling limbs, all bathed in a red light that emanated from the very skin of the girl, that she was actually smoking.

"Wait –" Clint's voice tripped out of his lips. He sounded almost panicked. It was for that reason that Natasha felt a chilled sense of foreboding sink dully in her stomach. "Wanda, wait." He moved his fingers closer to her shoulder but still he did not touch her, as though afraid of what might be sparked if he did.

The girl was shaking harder now. Her brother's head vibrated on the floor from the force of her body's convulsions.

"Wanda, you –" Clint's breath was coming out of his lips in sharp gasps. His own face was stained red from Wanda's light. "Wanda. You can't. Stop it. Wanda – stop it!"

In an instant Natasha understood the very thing Clint already had and she felt a gasp leave her lips, unheard behind the rattling caused by Wanda's trembling, which seemed to have seized the whole ship. Natasha discovered she had gotten to her feet, utterly entranced by the scene before her, hardly able to breathe and she thought why not? What made Clint so certain? Why not? Why couldn't she do it? Natasha had seen so many countless, unexplainably things, miracles brought about by this strange world assaulted by monster and magic. So many things that – why not?

Her heart leapt in her chest in what was half terror and half elation and she could not look away.

"Wanda, stop –" Clint tried again, voice strangled, fingers still lingering over the girl's shoulder, reluctant to touch her, fingertips blushed red from the pulsing glow of her skin.

"No – I can – I can – save him –" Wanda's voice came in a pained gasp, winding through the air, echoing in Natasha's skull.

"Wanda, no -" It was as if in slow motion Natasha watched Clint's fingers descend upon Wanda's shoulder, it was only by a hair his skin caressed the hot fabric of her jacket but his touch acted like a trigger.

The world shifted. Natasha stumbled forward. Some intangible force spiraled through the bridge with the sound of a raging hurricane, Wanda, Pietro, and Clint at its focus. The world around them spun and whirled and blurred and it all paused for the space of a heartbeat.

And then from Wanda there was an explosion of light – a vivid scarlet burst of energy flew from her chest, swept through the room, collided with Natasha so that she fell against the control panel behind her.

Natasha seemed suddenly deaf and blind with the combination of the roaring, blinding storm of light. The angry, throbbing force seemed to grab ahold of Wanda, clawed at her shoulders, tossed her body as if it was a rag doll, threw her backwards and away from her brother's still lifeless body and thrust her upon the metal floor with a dull, resounding clang.

The ship paused. Natasha could not breathe. For a moment there was absolute silence and then Wanda screamed.

It was as though there was a hole in Wanda's stomach, a dark, gnawing hole out of which something had been painfully torn out. And there was nothing left to fill it back up again. Nothing could ever fit in this space left empty inside of her. She would never be whole again.

She had realized it at once, as soon as Pietro's soul had left him and severed their connection with a snap like a broken rubber band. He had been the only one she had always been able to read. Since the very first day when her mind had expelled its talons, thirsting for some other consciousness from which to drink, its claws had immediately found and latched onto Pietro's in the cell next to hers, separated by mere brick and plaster no longer. He had never left her since that moment. His mind, thoughts, and actions had always been as plain to her as her own.

It was that same connection, she believed, that enabled them to survive when all the others had died. To break one of them would be to break them both, and all of HYDRA's experiments combined had been unable to destroy at the same time two minds, two bodies, two souls wedged together as completely as Wanda's and Pietro's had been.

But that connection was gone now. Her mind sought her brother's, reaching into a blank void, heaving for some hint of his continued existence but there was nothing, only a cold, white wall, so smooth and slippery that the tendrils of her power could find no hold.

"I cannot read him," she whispered, voice a pitiful whimper, dissolving into the cold fabric of Pietro's shirt. "I cannot read him. I cannot read him." She rocked back and forth on her knees, repeating the words over and over again in a kind of salutation, giving her some kind of rhythm, hoping that somehow repetition might ease the pain.

Clint Barton, the archer, Wanda could feel the heat of his body, legs so near to her own bent head. She could feel the reaching eyes and pounding thoughts of all the others, watching her, breathing, waiting for – waiting for what? There was nothing. Nothing at all left to wait for.

Wanda had waited to die, floating in the ruins of the church as the city had fallen. She had expected to die. She had welcomed death, beckoned it, waited for its cold embrace that she might again join her brother, might again connect with his own mind between the realms of real and dream.

But Vision had found her, had pulled her from the hungry jaws of death, had rescued her when she had least wanted it, when instead she had expected, waited, yearned for – if but there was a way, any way in which she could exchange her own life for Pietro's, could summon him back from wherever his soul had fled – could somehow grab hold of his mind, realms or dimensions away – if she could somehow grab hold of him once more and pull him back, bring him back to her, beckon him with the strange, pulsing power that hovered just under her skin, unexplainable, almost uncontrollable that resided within the very veins of her hands. There was no telling what she might do –

The very same power that she could use to tear the sanity from any man's mind – who was to say she might use it to restore instead of only destroy? Who was to say she might not –

It began to build within her chest, unconsciously bidden, growing, hungering, rising in swirling torrents that filled the gasping hole within her stomach and spread its coils through her body, uncontainable now, growing steadily, exponentially until there was nothing she could do to stop it.

And it grew. Like a ravenous beast it grew. It threatened to consume her totally. She did not care. Let it kill her. Let it destroy her. Let it shatter her own frail body if only it might reach Pietro, might touch his cold heart, might fill his body with her breath – her power –

She could do it. She could save him. Her love alone could save him. She knew it. For the other option was unthinkable, unforgiveable, and Wanda could not live with herself a moment longer to know she had not tried – had not prayed – had not given everything of herself to bring him back.

"Wait –" the archer's voice wound through Wanda's mind only distantly, a mere distraction from Pietro's cold body beneath her suddenly burning fingertips. "Wanda, wait –"

Wanda could not breathe. An irrepressible force had wakened within her and trembled through her limbs with a power that was almost as frightening as it was invigorating.

"Wanda. You can't. Stop it. Wanda – stop it!"

She could not release it. She could not find the trigger. She could not connect with his empty mind, could not warm his body with her heat, could not – she could not – but she must. There was no other option. She must – she had – she had to save –

"No – I can – I can – save him –" Her words scraped up her throat, bloodying her esophagus with their sharp syllables and she – she must – she must –

"Wanda, no –"

The touch of Barton's flesh against her own created a reaction like an electric shock. All at once the nameless, growing power condensed within her chest and for a shuddering moment beat there like a heavy, black second heart before it detonated. It flew through her every vein, her every cell and atom, searching for any possible outlet, her fingernails, eyes, nostrils, every pore of her skin.

It sped up Barton's fingers, tingled through his arm, touched his mind until suddenly Wanda was inside of him, saw the flash of his wife's smile, felt the pounding of his heart as he held a child in his arms, saw and tasted, felt with everything inside her the pain it was to leave them behind – the deepest fear that he might never see them again and –

The connection was sharply broken as she fell backwards, collapsed by the sheer emptiness of the raging power that had abruptly rushed from her. She felt the cold metal beneath her fingers, could hear her heartbeat pounding through the floor.

Wanda could still feel nothing of her brother's mind but a gaping, black hole, and she screamed.

Wanda screamed again and Steve realized she was sobbing, utterly incoherent with the force of her grief, the exhaustion of her power that had left her body in a rush of desperation that had – Pietro's body was still lying untouched by her knees – ultimately accomplished nothing. Her eyes were shut but she could evidently sense this fact, could feel no sign of life from her brother and knew she had failed.

Steve blinked past the stain on his retinas from the flash of light that had come from Wanda's body. Clint had been knocked against the wall from the force of the explosion but he was on his feet in a moment. He was the first to Wanda's side, with an urgency the others lacked, too stunned to move or speak, but he seemed to know instinctively what to do.

He bent down and wrapped his hands around Wanda's arms, hauling her to her feet with alarm that was almost brutal. She stood without any resistance, hanging limply in Clint's arms, face collapsed into his chest as he draped his strong, sculpted arms around her quivering shoulders, holding her like a father might his daughter.

Steve wanted to look away. There seemed to be something indecent about it all, about that much emotion, such raw grief displayed in front of so many people.

"No…." Steve realized it was Wanda speaking, voice almost unrecognizable, choked and distorted by her tears. "No – why...why could I not – I could – I should have been able –"

"You can't bring people back from the dead," Steve said, and immediately regretted his decision to speak. He had wanted to act as some sort of voice of reason but it then occurred to him that there was no reason to be found in any of this. He looked to Director Fury, suddenly there standing stonily by the wall, watching the scene impassively, dammit, like it was some kind of uninteresting sideshow at a circus. Fury had been brought back. Coulson had been. Bucky, too. Steve himself –

His mother had used to teach him about miracles, neat, happy fairytales he had learned about from the pews of church. Captain America was not accustomed to doubt, or cursing the name of God, but in this moment he wondered if the age of miracles might have passed away sometime in those ageless days of frozen ice and cursed hibernation, just as everything else had sped by while he had sat idly and unaware.

As if Wanda had somehow read his thoughts her voice choked through her ragged sobs, "Why do you not help me? Why? Is it because we fought you? Because we resisted you? Why do you continue to punish us?"

"No," Clint muttered into Wanda's hair. "No, Wanda. No."

Wanda suddenly tore away from his arms. Her eyes were wild as they fell on Tony.

"You! What about you? You created life!"

"Erm –" said Tony, obviously uncomfortable, "technically I created a self-aware artificial intelligence with a synthetic body forged by cellular regeneration…." Stark's voice was compressed into silence under the weight of the many pairs of eyes trained upon him.

Wanda appeared not to hear him. Her wide-eyed gaze found Thor, who faltered backwards as if he had been physically struck.

"And what about you? You are a god! Can you not…? Please, can you not..." Thor seemed frozen under her eyes. Apparently she did not yet know Clint's roll in her brother's death, lest she would not still be clinging to him, for surely her accusations against him would be gravest of all.

She shut her eyes and wailed again in inexpressible sorrow and slid from Clint's grasp as her knees gave out and she sunk to the floor. The bridge again went silent save for her wracking sobs, shoulders juddering against Clint's thighs as he continued to hold her, mouth moving soundlessly as if his words of comfort had been lost somewhere in his throat.

The archer's own eyes were bleary with tears as he stared at the opposite wall, hand stroking Wanda's hair whose face was buried in his stomach, on her knees so that she might have been the exact height of his little girl.

Pietro lay beneath them, body so stiff and pale there was no question that he could be anything other than dead. Steve looked to the ramshackle collection of beings in the bridge, two assassins, a god, a genius, and himself – a genetically tampered weapon – all silenced by the magnitude of Wanda's grief and disappointment. These were the people who made up his team, these who he was somehow supposed to lead, more defeated now than they ever had been before, even as they stood on the dawn of their victory.

He thought that miracles must be reserved for peoples more blameless than those who stood beside him. Steve swallowed past the tightness in his throat and thought he'd never have the heart to believe in miracles again.

Fin.

One thing that really struck me at the end of AoU was that there really wasn't a very strong sense of victory following Ultron's defeat. I think the team had just been through so much, not to mention Pietro's very real death – a first for Marvel, I think (hope) – that they were more focused on rebuilding than celebrating. I liked the sort of somber tone it gave the film, not to mention the promise of more strife for the team with the ever imminent Civil War.

I also got the impression Wanda would have been sort of unbalanced by her brother's death. I could definitely imagine her trying to bring him back by summoning all her powers and being utterly broken when it ultimately didn't work.

Oh yes, as a side note, I wanted to make it clear that I do believe in miracles and do not consider them merely "neat, happy fairytales". I was writing from Steve's perspective, who, I can imagine, also deep-down believes in miracles, but is just currently having a really rough time of life.

So, yeah, sorry for the sad story. Feel free to leave a review if you'd like to outline the different ways you plan on murdering me. Thanks for reading!

- F17