disclaimer: disclaimed.
dedication: to sonya, for teaching me about endings.
notes: barfs all over ultron i hate this movie so much so obviously im gonna write about it
title: no stars in the sky tonight
summary: You're not like other people. Once you start screaming, you don't know how to stop. — Wanda, Pietro.
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There's a hole in the floor.
"Oh, god," Wanda says. Her voice is a broken thing, matched only by the hollow grief in her eyes. They're ten. They're ten. "Oh, god."
"Don't move," Pietro says, grips her wrist like a vice, ragged nails biting into her skin. The bright sharp pain refocuses her. "Don't move, Wanda, don't."
They don't move.
They don't move and two days pass, and still the second shell doesn't explode. STARK blazes in between them, the name tattooing itself into the backs of their eyelids, into the very dark depths of their souls—STARK, like zing, like zip, like nothing. They're ten, and these are not the first of many nights where they go hungry and thirsty and cold, but they are the first where they are alone. Mama's body grinds to dust three floors down.
The sun rises on the third day, and Wanda shakes Pietro awake.
"We can't die here," she says.
"We have to go," he finishes.
They rise on unsteady legs, knobbly knees; they are three-days empty, salted and burned clean. Picking their way around the ruined apartment is easier than either of them expected. They never had much to begin with, and debris doesn't faze either of them: they've lived in a lot of places, and this will not be the last. Wanda doesn't say anything when Pietro breaks the only picture frame that wasn't damaged in the blast, cuts his hands open so badly that she has to pluck the picture inside out for him before she bandages him up. It is the only picture they have of the whole family, they're not just going to leave it.
The shell sits, a quiet lump of dark metal where the fridge used to be.
Wanda, younger and furious and more brave by far, presses her hand against it. It's cold beneath her touch, and the shiver that runs through her runs through Pietro, too. They've always been linked, feel the same things, and when she raises her gaze to his, they already have the same words in their mouths.
"We'll kill him for this," they say to each other, and it's not a lie.
It's a promise.
After they're gone, the whole building is quiet. There's no one else alive, here, not for miles and miles. No stars in the sky tonight; moonlight filters down through the wreckage, slicks off the white paint on the hulking bulbous curve of bomb. It glints like skulls with dead holes for eyes, bone-white and shining. STARK, it says.
STARK.