I.
The nights gnaw at Wanda like splinters, like the rubble of a long-crumbled apartment.
(Pietro had clutched her hand, knotting their fingers so close that she could almost mistake his gruffness for her own. Beneath the destruction, he had huddled around her, trading his iron warmth for her faith.)
His human wishing well.
Wanda rolls from pillow to flattened pillow, toes skirting and cringing around the excess bed allotted to them. Each turn combs her hair out of place, tugging it forward, smothering it past her lips, shoving it into her eyes.
A mattress melts deep for her. Its sheets spread wide, offering her ample linen to clench. Both bother her more than the gag of her hair.
There's too much space in the Avenger's Facility. Burrowing her eyes deep into silk-clad feathers, Wanda tries to bury herself cramped. Too much room, too large a bed, too much time between training sessions, too much darkness where Pietro's mind should be. A phantom pain where Pietro's palms should be; where they should stroke her forehead, her forearms, the nightmares from her goosebumps.
Her dreams slump and slug without his anxious slumber to calm; without his warmth beside her.
(She's always cold now.)
So she stands, gropes for the cashmere leaning against her desk chair, and folds her shivers within its robe. It brushes against the tank top hanging loose from her shoulders, the flannel billowing around her calves.
She turns back to the bed. She turns away from its emptiness. Hushing her feet towards the door, Wanda moves towards the hallway, for something she can do. She can't sleep, can't bring herself to want to, but she can wander.
Light spills through the cracks shuttering the kitchen door.
Wanda pauses, narrows her eyes at the doorknob, and turns it after several seconds' hestitation.
Steve Rogers turns around, his blue eyes widening at the door's creak, at her tip-toed entrance. "Wanda." Standing before the sink, he pulls his glass away just before the water chokes it full and overflowing.
"Captain," she evades, turns. "I apologize."
"Don't," he plays off his surprise into a self-deprecating grin. "I won't be the only one sleep-deprived come training tomorrow."
When he offers her a cup, she takes it.
A small television flickers on the kitchen wall, a blur of channel changes. The marble of her fingertip bounces against the remote. This news station, that too-darkly-lit movie, some too-bright soap opera. Her finger pauses at a swell of dramatic music placed against a pan towards a hospital door.
"I might have worked there," she says absently. Senselessly. 'There' is fiction, but so is any reality that has her clad in scrubs. A day-job, a husband, and a round belly. Twins. Pietro.
A daydream, once. Fiction now. Vinegar spoils her gut. The point stands.
A curve tugs at the corners of Steve's mouth, as though there's a punch line hiding between the letters of her answer.
Wanda frowns. "You think me unsuited towards helping those with addled minds?" She highlights her own irony, underlining and bolding it for all to hear. The emptiness of the kitchen throbs around her once more. For Steve to hear, she supposes, and Steve alone.
He steals her frown. Protests form in his throat; she can see them in his Adam's Apple, hear them before a syllable ever touches his tongue. You're fine. You're not addled. You sell yourself too short. A part of his lips, and the lines around his mouth quiver into memory. "You put Romanoff on her back today. And then walked it off when she put you on yours. I think you're suited for whatever you want."
Wanda pockets his halfhearted smile.
An absence of speech patches the air between them then, worn only by the wall clock's tick, an overhead plane's bustle, and their own slow breaths.
Pietro always breathed faster.
"My mother was a nurse," Steve offers, a handful of chirping cricket medleys later.
Wanda nods, files, and listens. She opens her mouth, only to remember the sketchpad that sometimes settles itself against Steve's chest, the furrow that seeps into his brow as his pencil moves back and forth across the page; only to realize she doesn't need to ask. An ice cube knocks against her teeth with her next slow sip. Strange to know someone without putting herself in their mind. Strange to know someone beyond Pietro well enough to read between the lines of their life.
So instead she asks, "How do you move on?" with a rush of ice water still freezing her chest. Because she has been in his brain, once. Because she saw the war and the girl and wine stain bullet wounds, and the fear that he'd never be able to do exactly that. Because she's felt the hollowness that pulses around him, where another life, another decade should be. Because he's filled it.
His fingerprints warm the fog slick around her glass when he tilts it back under the faucet for her. Long tangled hair brushes her shoulder with the next tilt of her head towards him.
"You don't." Steve shrugs the water back to her. "You get back up. You find other people doing the same. Find something to do. Eventually you're invested, and your new world feels that much closer."
Wanda doesn't blink. "You don't know either."
His chuckle could color a grayscale. "Not a damn clue."
Wanda nods, mutes, and drains her glass. Good. She doesn't want to move on. Not really. Not if it means abandoning the phantom of Pietro's palm against her cheek, the echo of his voice spiraling between her ears. She has never had to breathe without her brother before. When she came forth from their mother's womb, he'd sat wet and squalling and waiting for her. He's a second skin she can't bear to shed, even as it dries dead around her.
So, she murmurs a good night to Steve, and wraps its husk tighter still.
II.
She didn't use to hate. A human wishing well, Pietro had named her, when they were not yet orphans, only children. Eager to smile at a stranger, to assume his best of intentions.
Like all else in the world, optimism is not eternal.
Hatred fits her better now. Hate Tony Stark for killing her parents, for wilting her dreams into nightmares. Hate Ultron for fooling, using, destroying. Hate her brother for sacrificing himself. Wanda's fingernails scrape crescents through her palm lines. Sacrificing her.
The Vision stands next to her in silence, watching as she practices her energy manipulation. (Hexes, Pietro had called them.) She stands, leaves just as quietly.
Wanda never thanked him for saving her. She throws a glare behind her shoulder; he stares back. She never will.
She trusts the Vision, will work the Vision, will never forgive him for carrying her into the sky and safe from the falling city. Carrying her away from rubble and death and Pietro.
She never wanted to see his corpse.
Blonde hair – the wrong shade - gleams sunlit around the corner, a departure from the hall's stark walls and white furnishings. In one of the facility's myriad training rooms, Captain America shudders his fists' weight against a punching bag. It shudders in turn.
Wanda lingers, stares, in spite of herself. There's a physicality to him, a brute force she's always lacked. That her brother wore in spades. Pietro emanated it from his strong-set shoulders, to his looming height, to his quicksilver speed. Steve Rogers breathes a similar mold.
(Not the same. She gulps, folds her arms about herself. No one's the same.)
She hates Steve Rogers for the simple fact that he's not Pietro. Wanda turns back towards the threshold, just as he turns around. She hates herself for hating at all.
"Wanda," he calls.
"Sorry." Unclenching her jaw, she backtracks. "Wrong room."
He raises an eyebrow, surrenders his punching bag into a swing-set waver. "You looking for Nat?"
She trains with the Black Widow, sometimes. Trades guile and grace for hex magic. Natasha Romanoff is harder to hate. "My muscles still ache from the last time I looked for Agent Romanoff," she replies instead.
Reeking of the exhaustion he still hasn't managed to find, a jagged exhale arcs through his chest. He arcs a hand towards her. "Come here."
Wanda tilts her head. Steve's eyebrows hike towards his forehead in a bunched expectation that she's too tired to disappoint. His palms grapple warmth through her shoulders, bracing her before the punching bag.
"You want to move on?" he asks from behind her, his voice gruff at her ear. "Try moving this first."
She forms a fist, eyes her target with narrowed doubt. "Try hitting a bag of leather."
Steve's grip moves down to wrist, stretching her arm firmer. "It's easier, sometimes. Having something to hit. Better a 'bag of leather' than a ghost."
A bulbous swallow slinks down her throat, but she swings her fist regardless, knuckles thudding against red weight. "Nothing."
Callused fingers leave her skin, leave her feeling stripped and empty. "Maybe you're not hitting hard enough."
He leaves. Wanda's fist dangles in the air like wet laundry.
She doesn't return until later, slipping out of her room and through the facility's moonlit, moon-quieted hallways. Wanda eyes the light switch to the training room. She passes it by to plant herself before the punching bag once more.
You're not hitting hard enough.
The rubber band snap of Pietro's conscious from hers. The sudden emptiness of his mind hadn't come as a vacuum, but a wall; a barrier where she'd never known one before. Wanda slams and slams herself at its bricks.
You're not trying at all, she hears words Steve Rogers never said, through Steve Rogers's black-and-white-film voice.
Gathering her hair into a quick, haphazard knot, Wanda ties every loose strand away. (Some still escape to wisp against her vision.) She curls her left hand, imagines Pietro's fingers braiding it, and cries her fists raw against the echoes of Captain America's punches.
III.
There's a stack of pizza boxes staining her nostrils greased, a strand of cheese melting the roof of her mouth burnt, and an itch crawling across her bare foot when Tony Stark says, "And what would you see, Ring girl?"
Crust crumbles in her hand, its toppings biding a steaming coil down her throat. Curling her legs tight to her side, Wanda's heels knock against one of the (many) pillows cluttering one of the living area's (many) chairs.
Across the room, a question mark opens James Rhodes's mouth. Stark doesn't hesitate to answer it. "Visions-" he turns towards the creature of mind-stone and reason sitting straight-spined on the couch, doesn't miss a beat before continuing – "Sorry, hallucinations. Mind tricks. Worst nightmares come to life. It's kind of her thing." Cockiness spreads his arms wide, his chest wider, in a stance she never minded on Pietro. "We showed you ours."
Wanda sets her slice of pizza half-finished against her plate. She minds now.
"Tony," Steve's voice is a guard dog's warning. But his nightmares hadn't been so terrible, she recalls. A life that outlived him, a dream he grew beyond. She needn't look at Natasha to see the strain hidden amid her mask. (It's a good mask, not a crack to its surface, but masks no longer fool Wanda; can't fool the magic Hydra painted through her veins.)
Stark's is the longest surviving smile. Even Rhodes and Wilson, for all that she's never warped the darkness lurking in their heads, notice the tension strumming the air-conditioning's hum violent. "What? Buried hatchets, mended bridges. We're all friends here. No need for secrets."
A snort. Steve's. "Because you'd know all about those, wouldn't you, Stark?"
She hurt them. An apartment destroyed, a sob scratching her teeth, Pietro's chest heaving against hers, a weapon marked Stark smirking at them. They hurt her.
"You saw mine." Her voice hollows a funeral march, decked with all the quiet that mourning-wear and coffins entail. Her brother would loathe the closure of a grave.
Stark's mouth begins to move again. Romanoff slants him a look, subtle enough that Wanda might not have have caught its hard lines had she had not thrown her eyes away from Steve's pity.
Pietro's funeral had been small; it had been larger than she would have liked.
Tension sours tenser still.
"I believe a change in subject may be wise," the Vision's British lilt does nothing to ease the stiffness squeezing her knees tight and white together.
It's enough for her neighbors. Sam makes some quick remark about the Mets' roster, swinging a conversational lifeline to their leader. Steve pauses a glance at her hard eyes before latching to its threads, in a feat of verbal acrobatics.
Wanda's glance sleets down against her sagging pizza. Americans overrate everything.
Before she can depart from the mess of greasy cardboard and empty glasses etching their heat against the hard wood, Steve catches her arm beneath the pad of his palm. Her muscles forget to tense any tighter than the night has already cranked them.
(Because her bedroom is too large, too empty, and her bed emptier. Because even the phantoms of Pietro's arms don't tangle with hers as often as she would like. Because her brother would have raged at Stark, had she wished, would have clutched the clench from her hands and stroked the daggers from her knees. Because her brother's hands are gone, and she's starved for them.)
No one touches her anymore, if not to land a training blow. No one but America's hero.
"Stark doesn't think," he murmurs an apology he doesn't owe her.
A bitter smile pools across her lips, dressing her voice flat. "Liar."
He holds her gaze, and corrects himself. "We don't think the same things." Her arm feels miniscule in his grip; she wonders if his hand feels gargantuan spanned about its width. It doesn't matter. Just as she moves to shift away, his touch falls from hers. His eyes don't follow.
"I'm glad you stayed," he says low and slow, with all the ethos of a propaganda star.
Wanda nods, wishes away the pessimism drying her wishing well thoughts, and believes him.
IV.
Her first mission involves a rogue Enhanced with a wake of mind-warped victims. Wanda tilts her head, sways dark hair out of her eyes, rewords, and revises. First scheduled mission, first costumed mission, first mission as a girl without a brother. She revises that too, with a quick jab of her front teeth against her tongue. She'll always have a brother.
The mission is a telepath. (Of course it is, because her mother believed in karma, and it's coming for her now.) She's never met another Enhanced like her; the wasted, forgotten attempts in Strucker's lab may have joined her had things worked differently, but – Wanda raises her chin.
They're survivors, she and her brother. They were.
Steve scans her as she stands suited and dreading and ready to depart the quinjet, but doesn't say a word. Doesn't ask if she can handle this. Wanda looks up to flicker a smile at him.
She's a part of a team now, no longer knotted mangled into a single twin-sized unit, so she needn't carry the bulk of the work – 'work' referring to the crazed telepath who has compelled himself a cult, twisted the minds of perfectly average citizens until he's drenching their brains.
His followers form a hoard around him, so she culls them. Reaching into the minds of his followers, fixing those whose love he stole and whose banks he emptied, Wanda soothes them back to herself.
The Vision incapacitates the Enhanced easily, quickly enough. The android's mind might imitate a man's, but it's more than human - more than this reckless boy of unknown parentage and a foster-home-filled youth can infiltrate.
The target grins at her later, mad-eyed and subdued, just before Romanoff knocks him out. Even when he's contained safe and out of sight, she still hears we're the same in his leer.
She's not. She's better. She knows this.
Wanda feels as though her limbs are unspooling, tearing threadbare at the joints, so she fixes them to the floor of the aircraft. Fixes her eyes on Steve's star-spangled chest.
If she looked beyond the surface, she might see the frustration and regret and bitterness swelling within him. Wanda allows his composure to steady her instead. Even facing away from her, even focusing on something else entirely (all the more for focusing on something else entirely), he's a beacon of stitched together wounds and steady strength.
Wanda closes her eyes, reminds herself that they won, that she helped, and cleaves to both.
(He squeezes her shoulder before they land.)
(Her neck arches, and she almost sinks into it.)
V.
Sometimes, Steve disappears.
Sometimes, Wanda notices.
"Visiting a friend," Romanoff explains when her curiosity happens to show. Natasha has a way of reading people, reading her, that's as familiar as it is strange. She doesn't need red magic to sneak into people's heads. "Steve's sentimental like that," she continues, all droll nonchalance.
(Wanda can read people too. She can see the interest, the anxiety, itching around the façade.)
Eventually, his friend comes back with him. Shaggy, unkempt hair brushes his forehead, red throbs around his eyes, and his shoulders hunch locked and ready for attack. A metal arm grows from one, shiny and bulbous and wrong.
He whispers Natalia, shaking and strained, and Natasha forgets not to bristle. Steve never tries to hide his own.
Bucky Barnes, she learns later. Brainwashed. Killer. Victim. Steve's.
Some harp on one label, some on the others, but Wanda gears towards the last. Loss, she understands. The worry weighing Steve's stature, the need clawing at him, she knows well.
"I can help him," she murmurs eventually, once she's sure it's not a lie.
His mind is still messy when she leaves it, but he remembers at least. Remembers more than random flashes and snapshot faces and echoing names. He remembers Steve.
(And Wanda has his memories now too; can see Steve small and helpless and fighting. Always so driven, the would-be-hero, eager to sacrifice himself for a chance as a savior. Bucky's memories ache with it. They ache in her.)
"Thank you," Steve murmurs into her hair later. His palms clamp against her back, his elbows engulf her, and Wanda nods and nods against his chest.
"He's your brother," she says with her next full gulp of air. She doesn't offer further explanation before departing for her Spartan room, her empty bed, and her restless sleep.
Tears stain her pillow through the night. Her dreams evaporate blank by morning.
VI.
It's years before Wanda has any inclination to flirt. Touch is well and good, but trust tastes better against her skin than desire. Sweaty palms and rapid heartbeats - those she can inspire in any boy in any club or bar. She thinks of Pietro. She thinks of her name under his breath, of his lips on her forehead, and knows that lust will not fill the bullet wounds he left gaping through her.
Still, time yawns, and holes mend.
"Half the world's hot for you, and you spend your Saturday nights drawing," Natasha says to Steve with a snort one night before plopping herself on the couch beside him. From her other side, Bucky chuckles, his arm hanging around her shoulders.
Steve looks up over his sketchbook to raise an eyebrow at the both of them. "What can I say, I'm an old man." He shrugs, she rolls her eyes, and Wanda tilts her head, lowers her novel.
Her lips dip a shrug of their own. "Not so old."
Turning towards her, Steve catches her pointed look at the hard sliver of lower abdomen exposed by his shirt's hike. He huffs a smile, half-surprise, a quarter amusement, and the rest unlabeled.
Wanda turns back to her pages. She prefers to think it intrigue.
(Eventually, her mouth will sculpt to his hips' ridges. His fingerprints will carve themselves into her waistline, and her thighs will meld around his. That 'eventually' is many more 'eventually's' yet away.)
A look dances between them now.
It's enough.