"It is no doubt that we forget dreams more and more as time passes after waking"
Sigmund Freud, "The Forgetting of Dreams".
The Civil Wars/ Disarm
One
The World Without (You).
Wanda knows this isn't real.
The boy in front of her is framed by pearl-white air. They both are. But that isn't the point. She knows this boy, this boy who is the same age as her, this boy with the same tilt of the head, the same pale face, the same veins that bleed under his skin. They are the same, made the exact same way. She steps even closer, wanting to etch her fingers over his chest, just to see if they follow the same beat- one stopping at the same time the other starts.
Wanda knows this isn't real.
She knows this boy. But she's never met him. Not here.
It doesn't scare her, the thought of it. Actually, she feels like she's come home for the first time in all her fourteen years. She knows the patterns of his heartbeat in the same way she understands the movements of his body.
He is a breathing design she understands.
Wanda knows this isn't real.
And it breaks her heart.
"I want to know you better," she wants to say. But she doesn't. She doesn't need to. He smiles, and it's as heart-wrenching as her thoughts and she knows, knows with every fibre of her being, that this boy has read her mind before she even thought to think.
What completely shatters her is that she knows that when she wakes up, she won't remember him, only the ache that she's missing something more important than breathing; a half of a whole she never knew existed.
It is only outside of her, outside of this, that the tears come.
They come, and she doesn't know why.
She never, ever let this boy see her heart break from the outside.
She wants to keep it that way.
Ever since Pietro was a little boy he saw a girl's eyes stare back at him in the cracks of glass his father broke over the kitchen table while his mother screamed frantically at her little boy to run away.
Eventually, Pietro had the guts to leave the house and never return.
He saw stars and tracked moons and sometimes, if he looked closely, he could see that same girl in the reflections he left behind him in his travels.
She was from another world, he knew. This girl had a rawness to her he couldn't explain, and now, in his eighteenth year, he longed more than ever to understand her.
He loved her, but it was not the type of love people craved during the deep winter's cold: this love was something deeper, probably darker, maybe stronger, even, than a lover's love.
If definitely wasn't sexual, but the brutality of her made him want to twine himself closer to her, as if his gentler cockiness craved something more vivid, more intense.
He knew it had something to do with her power to ground him in a split second when all he longed for was the skies and the wind in his hair.
Even now, as he stares deeply into the pools of rainwater at his feet, he can see her, and even though he knows she is not real, it doesn't stop the longing for her to be close.
Just this once.
"Wanda!"
Wanda looks over her shoulder and grins at the graceful redhead that comes to walk alongside her. She can tell by the ballet shoes she slings over her shoulder that Natasha has a ballet recital. Then she thinks it is Tuesday, a snowy Tuesday, and the grey skies reflect the cracked glass underneath her skin.
"You aren't yourself today. You've been blanking out in class," Natasha says. Wanda shrugs. "Are you still feeling under the weather?"
For as long as Wanda's known her, Natasha has always been a mother hen. This is not unusual: they've been friends since Natasha beat the living crap out of Tony on the first day of school.
It was only after, when Tony gave her back the photograph, that she completely forgave him.
"I feel lost," Wanda murmurs, grappling with the straps of her bag. "Just lost."
"Is it sunny where you are?" the boy asks as he holds her hand. Wanda shakes her head.
"No. Snowy. Always snow, and rain. Lots of rain, too."
"That sounds right," the boy answers, looking away from her and to the great, white beyond before them. Wanda tilts her head, slightly. It's enough.
"You seem a very sad person," the boy replies. "The weather makes me think that even more."
"I'm only sad because you aren't real," she replies. He smiles into whiteness and she wakes up.
Glass breaks. Pietro knows his fist has smashed into the wall before he even has the power to stop himself. The glass splinters on the ground at his feet.
He thinks he's hurt her.
She doesn't reappear for weeks after that.
"I'm afraid I'll keep forgetting until I eventually remember."
"I know. But you won't. You always remember me."
Pietro sat on the bus and waited for it to pull off. The entire thing reeked of cigarettes and metal, but it was a ticket to the next city, a ticket to finding the girl he saw in a dream not so long ago.
He could feel her sometimes, in the spaces where his heart caved whenever he realized she wasn't by his side, and as he curled close to the cushions under him, getting ready for the overnight trip. He looked out the window, watched the darkness and the stars.
He closed his eyes.
He dreamt of her again.
On her sixteenth birthday, her parents buy her a silver chain with a single shoe on it. It reminds Wanda of a possibility she can't remember ever wanting or feeling. She leaves it in its box, waiting for the moment when an older woman would be strong enough to wear it.
"You can't keep on like this," Natasha says. "If you do, you'll break your heart."
"It's already dead," Wanda whispers back, staring at that box with venom.
Natasha, she knows, has already guessed the truth; the empty statuette in her chest has stopped beating a long time ago, alongside the photograph of the two babies floating in black space without a name.
"Has someone said something?" Natasha says, reaching out and holding Wanda's hand in two of her own. The walls of the bedroom they sit in bow closer together. Eavesdropping. Wanda doesn't trust any of it.
"Vision said he wanted to give us a try," Wanda offers instead, staring into empty space and wondering when her own eyes started staring back at her in the middle of the day.
"I think, in another world, we know each other even more than we do now," the boy says as they walk through white, blank space. Wanda watches the world before her with vague eyes.
"I think so too," she replies. "I think, in another world, you were as fast as the wind."
(The shoe on the chain burns her memory).
"And you? If you had the power to control anything, what would it be?"
In Wanda's mind she sees other worlds and a scarlet fever she cannot control.
They boy grins. "Sounds reckless. Beautiful, too," he offers, twining his fingers closer, closer, around hers. The warmth of his skin is a bliss she wishes she could remember.
In a world they both breathed in.
He isn't there when she wakes up.
She cries until her heart drips out of the body she has no power to control.
"Come on, Pietro. Come to bed."
"I don't want to. I have to go." The bed sheets rustle. A smile ignites the darkness. Pietro can see the white gleam of her teeth.
"So you really are a wandering gypsy?" she says. Pietro walks out and slams the door behind him.
"What are you thinking of taking up in college?"
"I don't know."
"But-" Natasha frowns, stepping closer to her. Tony shifts between them both, wondering if he's caught somewhere he shouldn't be. The silence between them is breakable, though. He says-
"Wanda. Don't you think you should be trying to figure out your own world before you try figuring out someone else's?"
It catches Wanda completely off-guard: but it's a little truth she understands.
Natasha turns and stares at Tony with wide eyes. Tony shrugs, silent.
Wanda breathes between the cracks of her dreams. A part of her wonders if she can break either reality when the boy she knows so well inhabits one, and her friends the other.
It isn't until her eighteenth year that someone says something. It is her mother who opens it all with the words, "Sweetheart, there's something we need to tell you."
"I know," Wanda replies. "I've known it for a very long time." She's known it since her sixteenth birthday, in fact. She does not say this, though.
Her mother jumps in her seat, hands hovering over the top of the kitchen table. Her father looks to his wife. He knew his daughter would see it before they ever had the chance to explain.
They were twins, after all.
Wanda feels cut-off from everything she's ever known.
"You've no idea how much it hurts," Wanda says. "You've no idea how much it burns inside, knowing he isn't here."
She gets up, walks away.
That night, the bombs fall like shooting stars.
Tony is the one who gets her out of the rubble: she sees the colour red and thinks of another world, another time, another place, where a boy could run as fast as any light and she, the little girl dressed all in scarlet, could manipulate thoughts as if they were toys.
Her parents fell into a black hole during the bombing.
She is not sad over their deaths. She is numb.
At the funeral, she remembers the lone, nameless gravestone next to their lowering coffins.
She knows it's his.
"Why didn't you say something?"
"Why did I need to? You already knew."
Did she?
Maybe.
Maybe it was right there, all along, written in the pearl-white of a gravestone without a name.
Pietro finds a cemetery sometime in the middle of winter. He isn't sure how old he was when he ran from his home, he isn't sure what year it is, how long he's been searching for a shadow that doesn't exist. The whiteness, the simply purity of the place, calms his frustrated heart. His skin itches to run again. He doesn't.
There's something familiar about the place. As if he's been there before.
He probably has.
He finds a lone gravestone next to the grave of a woman named Magda.
His mother's name was Mary, wasn't it?
He stares at the lone gravestone, and wondered when in this reality his twin had the time to die without ever telling him.
She decides to wear the chain after all. Natasha thinks it's because she's gotten over her grief (But it's really because she believes her brother's watching over her now). Wanda has no one now, not in this world. (But her brother's still waits for her on the other side).
Tony's family offer her a place to stay until someone decides to take her in. He acts like he isn't sure how to deal with someone younger than him: he shuffles from one foot to the other in the doorway of her new bedroom.
"Are you okay?" he asks, scratching his head. She nods.
She knows he understands when he looks a little closer and sees a boy he never got the chance to meet.
"You remember what I said, back then?" he says. She nods. She is sure now.
It won't stop until she is ready.
She is ready now.
Tony nods. "We'll be waiting, on the other side, kid. He's waiting, too."
Tony disappears through the open door and she knows that the dream is cracking in all the right places.
Wanda wonders how she could have missed it when it was there all along.
"I want to do all those things."
It's the first thing she says when she opens her eyes. The white, blank space before them stretches out in all directions, and it's dizzying.
"-Don't you think you should be trying to figure out your own world before you try figuring out someone else's?"
The boy smiles slightly: when she raises her hand and waves it, a world appears below their feet.
Their world.
Where they belong.
They are standing in space, looking down on the earth below. It's beautiful, cold, and quiet, away from everyone and everything. She is at peace. The boy grins.
"Do you want to come with me, Wanda?" he says. "To another world?"
She opens her mouth.
"Yes."
The dream snaps then. Reality re-configures itself.
She opens her eyes.