Chapter 2
"Pietro?" Wanda turned to her brother who was still looking at the big hole that was where their parents had just been. They weren't speaking English now; the situation was just too dire to mess around with new languages. They had both been blasted back into their bedroom. From downstairs they could hear a kind of crying scream coming from a child. "Pietro, is that…?" Wanda couldn't finish the sentence before the building began to collapse. As the floor opened up they clambered onto their bed, hoping it would give them a non-fatal landing cushion. It did.
"Wanda? Wanda!" Pietro broke into a fit of coughs as he slowly scrambled toward his sister who had fallen off the bed. When he reached her and realized that she was still very much alive, he cast his eyes to the sky. Well, not the sky but the ruins of their home. If he was looking for a sign from his God, it didn't come, just more dust and bits of rubble pouring down.
" Pietro." Wanda's face was slick with blood and sweat and tears as she lightly tugged his sleeve. She was pointing toward the sobbing noises emanating from the rubble pile where the screams had been coming from. As they both made their way over to the sobbing they glanced around desperately for any sign of their parents, but they couldn't find anything other than a couple blood-splattered areas covered in stone. Well, Wanda noticed their parents' remains, and almost retched, but Pietro was distracted in trying to find the source of the sobbing. Wanda waited a moment for Pietro to get ahead of her, so she could have an uninterrupted moment taking in the bloodstained stones where almost doubtless her parents were crushed under.
"Help?" a whimper emanated from the pile of rubble just ahead of them.
"Viktoriya?" Pietro replied weakly. He scrambled a little faster towards the voice, but only then he realized she was another floor beneath them. "Viktoriya! He cried out, but there was no answer, only a fit of desperate coughing from below. He turned back to realize Wanda was a couple meters behind him and said with tears in his eyes, "we have to help her," and then noticed the tears running down her face, " Wanda? Please?" Wanda quickly brushed away all visibility of her sadness and advanced to a point where she too could peer out over the ledge down towards where Viktoriya was.
"I think we can make the jump," Wanda said. She was hugging herself, but the resolve in her eyes bespoke steel within. "Look, there, there's a couple pillows scattered, if we aim for those we can avoid getting hurt too bad." Before Pietro could reply, she launched herself into the dusty haze below, landing on the pillow she pointed out earlier with a small cry.
"Wanda! Are you okay?!" Pietro shouted down to her. Wanda looked back up with a pained face rubbing her butt as she crawled off the pillow. Despite the horrors surrounding, Pietro's face flickered with the ghost of his signature shit-eating grin that was on display at dinner not ten minutes earlier. "Wanda, I'm coming down," he said as he too jumped for the pillow. He landed no more gracefully than his sister, and it was Wanda's turn to flash her teeth, as it was his turn to realize landing on his butt wasn't a great feeling. The apartment complex shook as mortars landed nearby, off target? It didn't matter where the target was or the intentions behind the attack, at least not from the Twins' perspective. Wanda looked around and saw shiny shrapnel imbedded in the walls around them, realizing that this was probably where the mortar hit. They moved towards the remnants of a kitchen counter as they neared the sobbing. There was a hole in the wall that looked like where a medium to small sized refrigerator used to be. The pair crept through that hole and sure enough, there was food littered all over the place, forming a sort of trail through another wall destroyed. There was a pool of milk that was just through the next wall. The two children paused a moment to survey the solitary puddle of white, but then it was joined further into the room by two streams of red as they looked up to see where the fridge had landed…
"Pietro?" came a confused whimper from a face whose green eyes were far too large from the pain. Wanda gasped, and Pietro just covered his mouth as tears formed in his eyes now.
Viktoriya's legs and part of her lower body were under the refrigerator. It must've blown backwards through the walls when the mortar hit, probably shielding Viktoriya from the initial blast, only to pin her to her bedroom wall. Without exchanging so much as a word, they made to get the fridge off of her. So they braced themselves against the wall and lifted, and to their surprise, it left the ground. They were able to shift it into a standing position, and they pushed it over away from them. Viktoriya's legs were broken, that much was obvious from the bones protruding from her shins, and her screams as they lifted the small fridge. They suddenly felt the heat from another explosion not too far off as the building shook again. A splintering crash brought a shell plummeting down in front of them, not two feet away and blocking their exit as debris rained down on them in it's wake. All three children's eyes were alight with horror. when the dust settled. The entrance they came in from was obscured by debris. The Shell had landed square in the puddle of bloody milk, it's logo facing the children. It was emblazoned with the name every child dreaded in a war zone: Stark.
Author's Note: Hey, I'm sorry it took me months to update. But I'll try and do better with the next chapter. Chapter Three might be the final one in this short vignette from the MCU. For those who read, please leave a review just to let me know what you lot thought of it. To the one person who reviewed my last chapter, you made my day.