Summary:
The Fates are three: The Spinner and the Measurer, and the Cold Cutting Blade. Life is but a cloth to them, as thoughts are to Wanda, and all things woven can be cut.
Atropos
It was a bright day that Wanda was taken. Bright and beautiful, sunny and clear, and they were in the woods about the base. Pietro darted through trees, Vision quietly floated through and watched the birds, and Andrej set frost dancing over leaves in beautiful curlicues. Wanda watched the sky, felt the minds around her happy, and was glad.
Wanda did not see the minds encased in metal, for to her they were not there. They were robots and not men and she could not sense them as she had not sensed Ultron for all she had Vision and Pietro both. The robots slip a needle in her arm so she is pliable, and they sneak her away.
The first warning they have is Pietro feeling the pinch-pinch-pinching of his sister's skin, the one which happens when she is more than a mile gone from him. She did not say she was going so far.
Wanda? his mind sends the darting silver thought to hers and finds it sluggish and coagulating blood. He rushes into her mind. WANDA!
The connection between them is slack. It has always been bright, been singing, even when they sleep it is live with love, singing with songs of memories and emotions, it is always active and now it hangs slack and empty. Wanda sends no scarlet. Pietro runs, runs toward her mind, narrows the gap feels the pinch-pinch-pinching on his skin from Wanda's mind recede.
He runs and he runs, and barely notices Vision's question, slipped through from his passage to Wanda's mind and thus to his. Pietro?
It takes three calls from the android to reach him. Pietro!
Wanda. It is his only reply. He runs on and sees an aircraft take off. He locks his sights on it, locks his everything on the wings of that plane and follows as fast as he can, leaving a silver trail through the edge of the forest. Wanda Wanda Wanda sings his mind, focussed like an arrow toward his sister. All the wood of his tree might as well be arrows, for all his will is directed toward her, inescapably.
It is his sister they are taking from him, his twin, and he will not let it stand.
He runs. He runs and runs, down Interstates and through fields, through street and city, between cars and trucks and people he runs and runs as the plane pulls upwards and farther ahead. He feels the moment his sister wakes and sends Wanda wreathed in rich blue gladness.
Where am I? she asks but more to herself than to him. It's these people, she sends, along with images of two robot faces, terrifyingly similar to Ultron's secondaries, and the back of one pilot's head, and then, it hurts, and the pinch-pinch-pinching but more like infected wasp stings, hornet stings, dog bites and butcher's hooks through flesh. Each metre further distant from him she is the more it hurts her. In a few minutes it is like flaying, like salt on open wounds like burning like… he feels the agony from her mind from the bond, he feels her head clunk onto steel and nothing else but a burning pain, a pain that brings up when he died in Novi Grad, and then…
He sees the plane but he falls to his knees. He screams in the middle of the field because he can no longer feel his sister and the last he felt was agony, was her memory of his death, of his body sinking to the ground, and all there is is her pain still running through his nerves and he screams and screams in the midst of the corn until Vision finds him.
Vision's hand falls light on his shoulder. "Pietro?"
His throat is hoarse. He does not have it in him to scream any longer and all he can do is sob and weep, water the ground with his tears and wish he was strong enough to tear it apart, to tear the plants down, to turn it back, to take back time and keep his sister safe at his side. He had wandered too far, he had let them close and she was gone gone gone.
Vision's hand whispers through the air over his head.
"I cannot see it," he says. His voice is soft and gentle and riddled through with sorrow. "The bond. It's sheared off again, with just your blue here."
Pietro sobs because the last time the connection was broken was when he had died.
Andrej catches up with them as Vision is helping Pietro back. He can barely stand on his own, and does not speak. Vision's face is solemn as he half-carries Pietro toward the base. Andrej sees his old friend, and the new android, and does not need to ask what has happened. He pulls out his tablet, and brings up messaging.
Widow: Wanda was taken. Vision, Pietro and I are headed back. Something bad happened out there.
The reply is almost instantaneous.
Plane or car?
Andrej shows the tablet to Vision, who points at plane.
Plane. Pietro ran after it.
Running checks on all GOI and suspicious plane activity.
When they get in Vision leads Pietro toward medical. The medics there frown mightily as he waves them all off, but he does not think he can take their touch right now. Vision is not human, and does not count, but with the bond to his sister gone it feels odd to touch anyone at all. He feels like he is floating, the way he does when he is running as fast as his speed allows, or when he is dancing in the space of his sister's mind. The lightness that means a freedom from the world, even as he sits, still and stunned, on the edge of the bed, and pushes away another medic.
"No," he says, and his voice is hoarse. "Leave me alone."
Fury comes stomping down, boots and great flapping coat, after only a moment.
"What's this I hear you lost your sister?"
Pietro almost snarls, he did not lose her, she had been taken, stolen away by someone who meant nothing good, and had escaped.
"We can't get her back if you don't talk."
Pietro digs nails so hard into his palms he almost breaks flesh, but he talks.
"Hm," Fury says, when he is done. "Robots. That's a novel idea. And they must have had time to notice what you all do when you're out there to plan for it, we'll need to improve that perimeter."
"What about Wanda?" Pietro asks. In his mind the wind whistling through the lianas is singing her name, Wandawandawandawanda as fast as the wind will carry it. He feels bare without the bond there, empty without Wanda's mind constantly updating his memories, checking his mind over, hiding from him the nightmare memories that creep up on both of them without Wanda's constant tending. They have shared their own minds so long, even with his swirling boundary, that without it he feels bereft. It is more than wanting his sister back. He needs her back like he needs air and sanity. Unbidden thoughts rise, Wanda's glowing red memory of his own death, Wanda's pain funnelled down the bridge, pain and pain and pain beyond anything she'd ever let him see from his testing the limit of their bond in training. He gasps in shock when Vision's hand comes down lightly on his back.
"I am sure," Vision says, his voice soft, "Your sister will do all she can to return here, and with her gifts they will not be able to stop her. She has only just got you back. I do not think she will let herself be parted from you for long."
The android's words, are, in truth, what Pietro has needed to hear. No quiet hint that the pain might have been Wanda's death, Wanda's heart giving out with the straining of keeping their bond in place. No hint of it being forever. Just certainty that Wanda will return. Pietro looks forward, through the howling cacophony of his wind's grief, and knows how Wanda would chose to return, scarlet dancing, lashing together the bridge as soon as sight and proximity allowed, looping the ropes of red through his mind, anchoring around the roots and branches of his tree as they ever did, as they were meant to. In his mind Pietro sits on a branch and rubs a great raw groove in the bark, where the last threads of scarlet fade in his bright blue light without Wanda's pulsing bloodied cathedral to warm it. He stretches out the stunted limbs of his own blue toward where Wanda's scarlet had always been, and he waits as the others decide what they will do.
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