Vision caught Wanda before she hit the floor, her body completely devoid of life. He had to hold her in his arms for a moment before he saw her breathing.
"She exhausted herself," he explained to the waiting Avengers. Steve nodded, and looked down at Bruce with haunted eyes.
"What did she see?"
No one wanted to know the answer to that question.
They made another bed for Wanda by strewing some blankets across seats. Vision and Clint watched over her while Steve and Natasha sat with Bruce on the other side of the jet. Tony had suited up to go take lookout duty while Thor rested. He was snoring away in the corner, legs stretched out in front of him.
"I wish I could sleep like that," Clint muttered to Vision. The man looked at him oddly, as if trying to figure out the joke, before he finally cracked a half-hearted smile, his hand never leaving Wanda's.
"I assume that after a thousand year lifespan filled with war, anyone would learn to grab sleep when they can."
Clint shrugged, feeling his stiff shoulders kink up and relax again as he did so. They had been on the move constantly since Fury's office, never a time for rest. Now, he didn't quite know what to do with himself. He couldn't bring himself to go sit near Bruce, to keep him company and smile at him when he woke up as if everything was fine, as if they hadn't failed him. He understood now, what the doctor meant when he said he was always angry. It was a hell of a force to deal with, especially when it was mostly at himself.
Sure, he still blamed Cap for a lot of it. Had their positions been switched, he was pretty confident he'd never have dragged his feet the way Steve did. But still, nothing was stopping him from taking matters into his own hands. Loathe as he was to admit it, he had believed like the rest of the team, that Bruce was immortal for all intents and purposes and the best course of action was to get him pardoned, freed legally, not make him a fugitive again.
There'd been a lot of empty words at the dinner table all those months, assurances that they would get them back. Months and months of planning, and no one wanted to think about where Bruce was then.
Now, he could see the evidence of it. Even draped in blankets, Bruce was shivering in his sleep. His face was haggard, starvation weight having sapped his strength away, with no tan or sun-kissed look that he had usually rocked. This was a man who had been tortured every single day for the last five months, and it had taken his team this long to find him and get him to safety. And some fucking job they did of it.
Sitting on an over-glorified sand bar in the middle of international waters because they couldn't keep him safe otherwise. And that was the kicker. They'd failed him. They'd found him, and still they failed him. Because at any moment he could go back. They couldn't stay on this island forever, and very few places would willingly take in a fugitive. They had none of Bruce's resources or knowledge at staying under the radar. Even Clint had only ever disappeared using SHIELD resources.
He remembered trailing Bruce through Brazil once, back when SHIELD had been keeping Ross away from him. He remembered hating the weeks before Bruce found a job. He wasn't allowed to intervene, only to steer soldiers off the trail if they caught it. But he very seldom had to intervene. Bruce was smart, never stayed in one place for more than a month or two. Clint could swear sometimes he could see the man looking over his shoulder, as if he sensed him. But he made no move to indicate that he did. And if Clint sometimes bought food just to dump in the trash cans he knew Bruce frequented, well that was his own prerogative.
"I did not think it would be this hard," Vision said, interrupting Clint's thoughts.
"What?" the archer asked, looking at Vis only to follow his gaze over Wanda's sleeping form and back to Bruce's.
"Seeing him like this. I cannot imagine… No, I can imagine. And that is what troubles me. How could someone do this to another living being? I have scanned him several times now, and each one reveals worse and worse internal injuries, half-healed by a recent transformation, but the scars still there, inside of him."
"Sometimes people can do terrible things to someone they deem less than human.." Clint said, but then caught his breath in his throat, "You can scan him for injuries?"
"Of course, my eyes are capable of seeing many light spectrums that are invisible to humans."
"Can you catalogue a list of injuries so we know what to treat?" Clint was breathless, they might not have to wait for Cho anyways. Maybe they could save him, treat him themselves, keep him where it was safe.
"Yes, he has a missing spleen, kidney, partial liver, and lower left lung. Judging by the level of gamma radiation in those areas, his broken ribs, left tibia, and right ulna were before his recent transformation, but he was not without dampeners long enough for his bones to fully heal. The quick change and then forced regression seems to have set them wrong, and they will need to be fully rebroken to be set correctly… This list will be rather long, perhaps I should compile it digitally and send it to you that way," Vision said, voice troubled. His grip on Wanda's hand had grown tighter as he spoke, until eventually he had to break his gaze away and move it back down to her sleeping face. She, unlike Bruce, was resting peacefully.
When Wanda felt herself waking up, part of her fought against it. Here, in her heavy sleep, there had been nothing. No weight on her shoulders, no missing brother, no shame at what she had done to a man with her actions… Just weightlessness.
But she felt Vision's familiar hand in her own, his fingers tracing a scar on her forearm.
"Vis…"
The hand on her tightened, and she felt fingers carding through her hair gently. Her eyes slid open, slowly, letting the light trickle in at a pace her pupils could handle. When she finally had her sight restored, Vision was all she could see. A tear trickled from the corner of her eye, and he caught it with a fingertip.
"What have I done?" she gasped.
Vis pressed his lips to her forehead, hands planted on either side of her face, cradling her like something precious.
"If a stone is thrown into the water, would you blame it for the ripples it creates? Or the hand that threw it?"
She understood his point, his need to take the guilt from her. But some things she needed to carry, or no one else would.
"Thank you, Vis, but I need to face this. I am not a stone, and I made these choices," she said. He only nodded, feeling her hand clench over his own. He moved back, never breaking their hold, to let her rise.
Wanda turned her head directly towards Bruce, to where he lay across from her. She tried not to tune into his body, tried not to feel his pain, tap into his memories again. He rested fitfully, and she could feel the memories crawling beneath his flesh. Nightmares, the ones he had lived over and over again. She clamped down on Vision's fingers, the only link to the world around her.
Natasha looked up from her position by Bruce, her own hand wrapped around his as tightly as Wanda's around Vision's. But unlike them, Bruce did not grip back.
"I can wake him up," Wanda offered quietly. Natasha nodded once, curtly, not wanting to meet the girl's eyes. Wanda couldn't blame her. They all knew who had really done this to Bruce.
You are not monstrous.
She tried to repeat it to herself, but couldn't bring herself to feel it.
Wanda closed the space between them, feeling Vision's hand in her own as he trailed behind her. Silent and supporting, he didn't question or condemn her. She didn't need to look back to know he would be with her.
Her other hand reached out to brush through Bruce's cropped hair, to rest her fingers lightly on his forehead as her glow briefly surrounded him.
When he woke up, he woke up fighting. He knocked Wanda's hand away and yanked his own from Natasha's grip. It took only a second for his eyes to find Wanda, and there she saw all the things he'd been dreaming about. The pain, the agony in that gaze was enough to drown in. She gripped Vis' hand like a lifeline, and brought her other hand down to Bruce's. He was beyond words, but into her touch, she fed reassurances.
You are safe, there are only friends here. You are safe, Bruce, it is over.
She repeated this over and over into his skin, feeling it rush up his bloodstream and into his panicked gaze until, at last, his heart slowed and his eyes cleared enough to see her.
"Wanda?" he asked through cracked, parched lips. His tongue moved like a stranger, and Wanda suddenly had the sensation of a sickening slap and a rush of blood into her mouth. She bit her bottom lip, willing the pain away, forcing herself to focus on Bruce.
"I'm here," she whispered through her tears. Bruce turned his hand beneath hers, and loosely wrapped it around her own. The gasp that tore its way from her mouth made him tighten his hold.
"As am I," he said, a small smile quirking the corner of his mouth despite the grimace it caused.
At that, Wanda lost the small bit of composure she had managed to cling on to. For so long she had thought him dead, nearly at her hand, and with three words he had figured that all out. Had called out the burden she carried, took back her guilt, and calmed a storm that had been building in her since Pietro's death. His letter, for all of his words, was nothing compared to the feeling of seeing him alive and hearing the words out of his mouth.
She collapsed onto her knees, burying her head into his shoulder and sobbing out her agony, and his. He stroked her hair gently, voice so tired but still so kind as he reassured her, whispered Romanian into her ear, letting her hear his voice in her own language.
"This is not your fault," he said to her in Romanian. And he was broken, she could tell from the way speaking seemed to hurt him, how every breath caused a twitch in his arm. She could feel his pain flowing into her with every point of contact they shared, but she couldn't bring herself to pull back, to separate herself.
No, Wanda wasn't a child, but Bruce held her like one all the same, and a hole somewhere inside of her slowly closed with the knowledge that the man she had killed, the man she had tortured, the man who had forgiven her from beyond the grave, was here in her arms. Alive, maybe not so whole, but alive.
You are not monstrous.
The words flowed through his veins, pulsing inside of him until Wanda knew he felt it.
"No, you aren't," he said, and simply held her as she cried.