Notes:
I've been thinking about this story for a long time, even if for a long time I didn't think this was something I could ever write about, and, once I started writing, I didn't' think I was going to post it (since it's basically a bunch of headcanons and kinks—all that my mind has built during my many, many years as a fangirl). Eventually, my friends encouraged me in doing so, and so here we are :D
Everything influenced me: comics, animated series and movies about X-Men; the amazing – and my favorite – Maxicest fic "If wishes were horses, we would rule the world" by epicureanEmpath; and random books and movies as well, but, for sure, comics have a privileged place (they inspire my fantasy more than everything else).
So: this is a different version of the twins' origins story, and although it's Maximoffs centered because they're all I care about, it won't be exclusively about them.
The first part, "The fall", is about the twins being in a horrible situation and how they got there, and it evolves around the manifestation of their mutant powers, with a special focus on their (especially Pietro's) relationship with their fathers. Also, I wanted to write about Django and Marya for a long time, and so I did it ;)
I have to thank a special friend, the lovely AryYuna, for being my beta reader (you're such a darling! 3 ) and Dhely, as usual, for her friendship, her advices, and her love for Erik and the Twins 3.
[One last thing: the fic has a lot of flashbacks, to make the reading easier I specify that the horizontal line indicates that a flashback has begun/finished]
I hope you'll enjoy it.
Chapter 1
He felt the impact. He heard the cracking of the man's neck that snapped under the touch of his forearm. He heard the little whisper, the muffled cry almost entirely swallowed by a death that had come too sudden, too fast to leave a proper echo in the air.
Pietro stood as still as the corpse before him and waited to feel what should have followed: anger, disgust, sorrow―guilt.
Nothing came.
"Now that wasn't so hard, was it boy?"
Pietro didn't move. Stillness felt safe, somehow. Weird, definitely, especially for him, but safe: by standing still he felt as if he could defer whatever would come next—because, well, he knew better than hope for something good.
His eyes moved in a parabola along the white walls of the big and empty room until they reached those of the man that had just spoken, the man that had just made him kill.
The man who owned him.
Arms crossed on his chest, in his usual military uniform, Striker looked at him with a hideous satisfied grin.
"How's he doing?" he asked, without even turning his head to the scientists behind the glass wall.
"Two minutes, maybe a little less."
Striker made a weird expression.
"The subject is coming around faster than last time."
Subject was the least offensive nickname the young mutant had experienced so far.
The Colonel grabbed Pietro's chin and stared, examining him. "I guess it doesn't come as a surprise," he said to Pietro's face, but clearly not talking to him, and then made a creepy noise, as if he wanted to laugh but was not able to—which, to be fair, was not far from the truth at all. He adjusted his glasses on his nose. "He's growing."
Striker moved Pietro's head both sides, and then sighed.
"Imagine what you could do in a year, boy. Imagine what you could do when you'll finally stop behaving like a little brat and start to cooperate."
Still motionless, wondering how—and if—he could ever actually be more cooperative than that, Pietro blinked. Once, twice. A warm, uncomfortable wave radiated from his chest to every inch of his skin. His body was working off the drugs and it always happened in a quite unpleasant way. There had been a time when Pietro had defined that painful. Now he just felt the need to clench his jaw and stretch his neck.
Striker rapidly withdrew his hand, thoughtful.
"He's coming around a lot faster" he remarked. Beneath Striker's usual cold expression, Pietro couldn't help but notice the man's disappointment. "See to fix this."
Pietro took a small step back and immediately cursed himself for doing so. He didn't want to show them that he was scared, but when something needed to be fixed, he knew he should expect the worst.
Just kill him, a voice whispered inside his head. Kill this motherfucker like you just did with this poor folk here.
In less than a second, more than a thousand reasons to do that ran through his thoughts. But the one reason not to was so much more important than everything else.
Wanda.
And then the pain came. Sharp like a blade, the electrical shock cut his spine in two.
Pietro hit the floor with a dull sound, but he didn't even feel the impact: his mind was already trapped inside a nightmare filled with creatures biting his flesh, burning his bones, and piercing, cutting, scratching, severing.
One, two, three never-ending seconds of blinding agony. Then, he could scream.
Not that that helped.
Actually, it only made everything worse. Pietro hated it—hearing his own inarticulate pain cries, feeling pity for himself, being forced to surrender to his captors and lose whatever dignity he still had left. When in his cell, chained with huge lead restraints and heavily drugged, Pietro felt strong—or he could pretend to be, telling himself the tale that if they needed to take all those precautions just to force him still, that meant he must bereally powerful. But when that pain came, and he wasn't strong enough to fight it, everything was ripped away from him, leaving him exposed, face to face with what he truly was: just a scared, weak, stupid little boy.
A stupid little boy that couldn't help but step back in a childish, humiliating and vain effort to escape the pain. A stupid little boy that couldn't avoid to think about his parents while lying on that floor, still praying for a rescue, wishing to have his life back, to go back.
To his home.
To his parents.
To Miss Roxana's white cat, the one with eyes of different colors.
To the big fountain in the square that froze in winter.
To him and Wanda sliding on it and coming home all wet and with their teeth chattering. Laughing.
Just count, the voice said. Count and keep them away from here. Keep them safe.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
He took a breath. He screamed again.
Just keep counting.
Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine… thirty-three… forty-two… forty…
Numbers.
White, aligned on the blackboard just like tiny chalk soldiers.
Miss Žaklina's beautiful handwriting.
Pietro was so bored.
He'd figured out already that the x was a 9, but he didn't say it. Last time he'd been accused of cheating, so he'd decided to keep that to himself.
Hiding a yawn behind his hand, Pietro turned to the window: it had started snowing, but it wasn't cold enough yet and the snowflakes melted on the ground. He gazed mesmerized at their unpredictable whirling movement: every time that he thought he knew where one of them was going, it swiftly changed direction with a gracious pirouette—almost making fun of him.
"Pietro," Miss Žaklina put her hands on her waist and, with her most ironic tone, asked: "are we bothering you?"
"Sorry" Pietro muttered, shifting on the chair.
In the right corner—exactly on the opposite side of the classroom—Wanda turned her head in his direction and smiled sympathetically at him. He quickly showed her his tongue and winked. His sister giggled beneath her teeth and brought her gaze back to the blackboard.
Then, something funny drew his attention: there was a fly flying in front of him, just behind Vera's blond ponytail, only that it wasn't a common fly, because it was flying so slowly that it seemed almost frozen in the air.
Pietro blinked. He could see the insect's wings going up and down and up again, and when he raised his hand he realized he could easily close his fist around it—and so he did it.
Vera's ponytail slapped her in the face and she turned to Pietro, glaring.
"Why did you do that?"
Pietro recoiled, confused.
"What?"
"Why did you hit my hair like that?"
"I didn't hit your hair!" he replied. "I didn't even touch it!"
"Pietro! Vera!" Miss Žaklina scolded them. "What's going on?"
"He threw my hair in my face!" Vera repeated, offended, and Pietro didn't know what he could say to defend himself: he was sure he hadn't touched Vera's stupid hair, and yet he knew Vera wasn't exactly lying either, because he'd seen her ponytail moving, just as if an invisible hand had pushed it.
Miss Žaklina sighed and opened her arms. "Pietro, what are you doing? And… what do you have in your hand?"
A weird silence fell on the class, and by now everybody's eyes were pointed on him. Pietro bit his lower lip and muttered: "A fly."
"A fly?"
He waited a couple of seconds before deciding to open his fist. The insect flew away and that—for some reason—made everybody laugh.
Wanda stared at him rising her eyebrows with a familiar look on her face. The seriously, Pietro? look.
Pietro answered with a little shrug. The not my fault shrug.
Vera crossed her arms and grinned.
"Well, you could apologize, at least."
"For what? For not having hit your stupid hair?"
She brought her face closer to his and whispered: "Liar."
"You are the liar!"
"Okay, enough, both of you," Miss Žaklina said, but not fast enough to prevent a kid to yell:
"Pietro wants to kiss Vera!"
Pietro had never, ever in his life before, been so much embarrassed. He felt like he was on fire.
"What? Of course I don't!"
Wanda made a grimace—the one she used to make when he would say something really, really wrong.
In Vera's eyes, Pietro could see how offended her pride was and he realized he shouldn't have said that, especially not the way he had.
"As if I'd ever kiss you" Vera hissed, and then turned on her chair and crossed her arms in a quite dramatic way.
It would have ended like that, just another stupid children's fight, but then she had to add: "a gypsy!"
Fists clenched, Pietro jumped to his feet, furious. Simultaneously, Wanda had gotten up as well and was gazing at him shaking her head—the please Pietro, don't! kind.
He opened his mouth with the worst kind of curses ready on his tongue, but he hadn't the time to say a word. Wanda had raised a hand as if she wanted to stop him—obviously worried about the troubles he'd find himself in if he'd dare to say a curse aloud in class. Pietro would swear he just saw a thin red lightning cross the room, while a load rumble filled the air.
A big piece of plaster fell from the ceiling just between the blackboard and Miss Žaklina's desk.
-0-0-0-
"Can I tell you a secret?"
In the pitch dark of their small bedroom, Wanda smiled.
Night had always been their time. Once in bed, lights off, they would engage in interminable conversations about the most disparate topics (did aliens exist? And—say they did—what kind of technology were they supposed to have? What would they look like? What would they do on Earth? Would they try to take control of humankind—that was Pietro's point of view on the subject—or would they hide among humans for research purpose—this one was her own). They would go on for hours until one of their parents would yell from the room next door Go to sleep right this very moment, you two! Or until their speculations would turn into something more delicate, private: a nightmare, a weird thought—a secret.
It had always been like that. It was almost as if, hidden in the darkness, buried under tons of blankets, everything was allowed, and they could let literally everything that came up to their mind enter their conversations—all the things they'd never dare to talk about while sitting at the breakfast table. It all happened with such candor that, the day after, they often wondered why they'd never spoken about that particular thing before.
"There's nothing funny about it, Wanda" Pietro muttered annoyed, twitching under his duvet.
Wanda rolled on her left side, meeting a spark of light coming from his irises: her brother's eyes were so bright she could always find them—even in that total darkness. "I'm not laughing."
He grunted. "But you're smiling."
"I'm not."
"Yes, you are."
Wanda lifted herself on an elbow, her smile going from ear to ear.
"You can't even see me, Pietro."
"But I know you are."
He knew that, exactly as she knew he had on a grumpy face. Wanda covered her mouth to giggle, but her brother heard her anyway—he was too close not to.
He kicked his sheet to make himself more comfortable. He would always move in bed as if the mattress was burning —or as if there wasn't in the universe a way for him to be still and comfortable. "Said you were" he muttered in a satisfied tone.
"But that doesn't mean I don't want to hear your secret."
"Now I don't want to tell it anymore."
"Come on, grumpy, tell me!"
Wanda stretched her leg out of her sheets and rubbed her foot against her brother's leg. His bed was less than an arm far away from hers—the best solution their parents had come up with when the time'd come for them to stop sharing the same bed.
Pietro jerked, making the bed's springs shriek horribly.
"Wanda!" he yelled, biting his tongue realizing he'd raised his voice too loud. "You're ice-cold!"
"Come on, tell me! I wasn't laughing at you, I was just smiling by myself." She waited, but Pietro didn't say a word.
Wanda sighed. He was extremely moody recently, while, as if to compensate, she felt more radiant by the day. Mama had said that Pietro was just growing, and when Wanda had argued that they were the same age, Mama had smiled and said that Wanda had grown already, because she was a girl, and that was how things worked.
She didn't exactly catch what her mother meant, but, in a way, it seemed to make sense.
"Pietro."
Silence.
"Well, whatever. I already know what you were going to say."
Pietro snarled. "I really doubt it."
"Want to bet?"
"Sure! But I warn you: you're going to lose this time, sis."
Wanda grinned, well aware about what she was going to unleash upon herself by saying that, and yet unable to resist the temptation.
"You wanted to kiss Vera", she spitted out, and then closed her eyes and protected her face with her hands. The pillow hit her and before she could take a breath her brother was on top of her. She couldn't tell why she was trying so hard to make him upset—which, by the way, was hardly challenging lately—all she knew was that she missed how they used to play, she missed rolling on the floor or the grass with him, she missed him tickling her—she missed him.
And if growing up meant building walls between the two of them, then she didn't want to.
She twitched, and as soon as she managed to free an arm, she grabbed her own pillow and fought back. Pietro didn't expect the attack to arrive from the side and groaned spectacularly, pretending to be in pain. Giggling, Wanda managed to free a leg too, and intertwined it with Pietro's, making him fall on her side. He jumped on his knees in a flash and she got up as well. They grabbed their hands and started pushing.
A beam of light passed under their door and they froze as they stood: a ridiculous reproduction of an ancient marble statue.
When silence remained silent and none of their parents came in to yell at them, they automatically stopped the fight and lay down together, panting softly.
Pietro grunted against her neck.
"I did not want to kiss stupid Vera."
"I know," Wanda whispered. "But you're really bad at talking with girls."
"That's not true. You're a girl and I talk with you all the time just fine."
"That's different."
Wanda caressed Pietro's hair until she found his scar. It was a bad scar, roughly stitched by the first aid doctor who only cared about stopping the bleeding as soon as possible, but since it was hidden under his hair, it was only visible when Pietro shaved his hair—which he did very rarely.
"Does it ever hurt?"
Pietro muffled a laugh.
"It's been almost three years, Wanda."
"I know—I remember. It's just—"
"What?"
"Nothing." Wanda shrugged, thinking of how odd Pietro's white hair had appeared all covered in blood. "It's just that it was so bad that it seems weird that now it never hurts—not that I'd like it to be different."
"Yeah, it was baaaad," Pietro said mimicking a ghost voice—or what he thought should be a ghost voice. "There was blood everywhere, and the wound was so deep you could see the poor child's skull underneat—" Pietro coughed because she hit his chest to make him stop, and then they started to laugh together, covering each other's mouth to not wake their parents up.
"Anyway, it doesn't hurt," he reassured her. "It only hurts my pride when all of you people make fun of me because a stupid pigeon made me fall from the ledge."
"Come here," Wanda made more room for him in her bed, and he slid closer. "You know," she said, "I was not joking about the secret: I know what it is."
"I know you do," her brother whispered. "Because I know yours."
Wanda had always loved winter.
She would close her brother's blue sport coat on their way home from school and he would protest that he didn't feel cold; they would tap their feet on the doorsteps to make the snow fall from their boots before coming inside; Mama would make hot tea and fried bread—sugar for her, cheese for Pietro—and they would tell her how their day had been.
Don't speak with your mouth full, Mama would say.
Wanda sighed, her fingertips lazily tracing waves on the wall of her cell.
It was winter when they'd been taken. She wondered what time of the year was now, and whether there—wherever this there was—it would snow in winter.
She remembered how bewildered she'd been when Tate had told them that not everywhere in the world they had snow. Pietro had laughed and asked how can these people tell the difference from other seasons of the year?
Tate had said that seasons are different even without snow.
Wanda had thought it was a pity though, to not have it.
Snow meant so many memories to her, and one of her firsts and favorite ones among them: she and Pietro running into the courtyard, laughing, trying to catch the snowflakes with their tongue. The memory was old and a bit evanescent, and Wanda couldn't really tell how much of it was true and how much had been compromised by her parents' telling throughout the years instead. She remembered the feeling, though: the snowflakes that turned hot on her tongue; her arms stretched out, spread like wings; the wind that caressed her face as she made pirouettes and the world whirled all around her.
It felt like freedom.
Wanda sat on the floor, hugging her knees.
Footsteps came from the corridor. She raised her chin and brought her gaze to the glass door. Rumors became shadows and shadows turned into bodies made of flesh and bones.
Strikers and his gofers.
Wanda instinctively caressed her collar—that satanic device that kept her powers locked away.
Their visits were a rare event, so they always made her anxious. Apparently, they didn't know what to do with her anymore: they had analyzed her in every possible way (except for an autopsy) but, with their huge disappointment, they hadn't been able to find anything in her biology that could explain how her power—whatever it was—exactly worked. A few times they had tried to loosen that device so that she could partially use it and they could at least see it working. They'd asked her to do things, little things, just like: open the door.
She makes things happen—that was what she'd heard one of her captors whisper. But Wanda thought they were wrong. It could seem as if she would simply express a wish, but truth was that even if she could alter the way things were, the result was unpredictable: one time the handle had fallen from the door. Another time hinges had loosened. On her last attempt, the scarlet spark that bolted from her hand had broken the door right in the middle: a big crack slashed the door almost in half, as if a thunder just hit it, and Striker had waved his hands so hysterically for his collaborators to turn her collar on again that Wanda had thought he was going to dislocate his shoulders.
From the other side of her cell's glass wall, Colonel Striker grinned viciously at her, turning the screen of a tablet on.
"I want to show you something."