Author's Note: Thank you to my friend, to whom without their help, this chapter would be about 500 words with a crying emoji at the end. ;)
Warnings: Violence, gore.
Chapter Fourteen:
"This is a terrible idea."
"So you've said."
"We have two Infinity Stones. Don't you think we should be doing something with them instead of sitting on our hands?" The true edge of exasperation in her brother's voice gives her pause, and Wanda glances over at him with a raised brow. He doesn't bother to meet her gaze from where he's perched on the seat of the balcony overlooking the city. The light wind is tossing his pale hair and making his eyes look sunken into his face.
Wanda leans forward, resting her arms on the railing beside her brother's shoes. "At this point, I don't care that much," she admits softly, "I just want him dead."
Vengeance for Vision. For Loki, all the others that Thanos has killed...and herself.
Pietro's lips press together and he sighs, leaning forward a little. "Wanda…"
"Don't," she shakes her head. "I know what you're going to say. About how I need to focus on something else beyond my rage, about how it wasn't my fault. But it was. I should have done something. So no, I don't care that we're waiting for him to come to us."
Let him come.
She may not be ready, but she'll make him regret it. They've already waited two days. They've estimated it will be any time now, and they're holding their breath before the fighting begins, waiting. Wanda hates battle anticipation. She feels like she's been teetering on one since she was ten.
Pietro blows out a breath. "I get that. I just…" he doesn't seem to know what he wants to say and lets it trail off for a beat. "Look...about Vision," Wanda stiffens at the name, lifting her gaze up, daring him to keep going. He does, because he's her brother, and knows when her threats are valid, "It wasn't your fault. And I'm sorry. I didn't...I know he meant a lot to you."
Meant a lot?
Da.
One way of putting that.
Wanda sags a little, blinking tears of frustration out of her eyes. "He proposed to me," she murmurs. It's the first time she's told anyone. The knowledge of his love felt like something private. She was afraid to share it, as if it might taint his memory somehow.
Pietro's eyes snap up.
"Right before he was taken," she continues, worrying her lower lip between her teeth. She snorts softly, thinking about the barn, and the blade shoving through her vozlyublennyy's chest, the wide-eyed look of pain and horror he'd flashed her. It's not funny, and never will be, but she still says, "I mean, right before. The timing that Loki and his sister had in the barn was immaculate."
Pietro's eyebrows raise. "Cinematic?"
"Cinematic." Wanda agrees. She rubs at her forehead with two fingers, sighing softly. "I don't even know what happened to his body." Some variation of a lie has been told to her, but she's not sure where the deception ends and the truth begins. The rage she felt, the need to hurt something at the sight of him laying dead at Thanos's feet...that hasn't changed.
"We can give him a headstone," Pietro offers. It's as close to saying he's near enough to human to count that Wanda thinks she's ever going to get. She lifts her head, filled with sudden, deep sadness. It came too late. Everything always comes too late. Acceptance is something given after death, when it should be before. There's nothing that can be done.
Wanda huffs. "And what good would that do?"
"You could leave him circuit boards." Pietro offers, the edge of his lip pulling up. There's no bite in his humor, not like there would have been months ago. "I'm sure he'd appreciate the thought."
Wanda flicks her gaze up in well-versed annoyance. "Tempting, but no."
"You doubt me?" Pietro asks. The question is said in a humorous tone. The weight in his eyes suggests a double-edged sword. Wanda's lips press together for a moment as she tries to gather a response. Joking is not a habit to her, but the idea of holding the weight a serious conversation would press onto her makes her inwardly shrivel.
"I don't agree with you, brat."
Despite her resilience to it, the humor eases something tense inside of her chest. Almost like a balm to the ache. It's not enough to make it stop hurting, but it's a start.
"Trust me, I know guys and I know computers."
"Ha."
She catches something blurring in the sky from the corner of her vision before she sees it. The ship seems to smack against the air, slipping in between the clouds with a deafening boom. Long, ugly and twisted. A ship that she recognizes faintly, from memories that no longer feel like her own.
Thanos.
Pietro releases a soft sound, almost like a sigh. They share a long glance before pulling out the comms that Tony gave them two days ago to wear on their person at all times until now. Until Thanos arrived. They both tuck them inside their ears.
"Pora." He says quietly.
"Pora," she repeats, just as soft.
It's time.
000o000
Wanda has never been to war. Not in the traditional sense. Although Sokovia was ravaged by a civil war, she and her brother managed to avoid most of the fighting. They weren't helpless, but the fight against Ultron was their first introduction to something real. Stimulation only gets you so far.
Everything after that with the Avengers was harder, but easier at once.
This isn't anything like that.
Asgardians don't fight with guns and shields. They fight with magic and strength that is staggering. They're not human, and she's reminded of this again and again as Thanos's creatures swarm the Asgardian capital, looking to kill.
On the front lines, she doesn't know how deep into the city they get, and a part of her is terrified of the answer.
Thanos himself stands at the Bifrost, large, intimidating, and overlooking the battle with an air of impassivity that strikes Wanda as horrifying. He doesn't care about the blood being split in defense of his creatures. He doesn't care about the body count. He stands with his Gauntlet, large double bladed sword in his other hand. Unbalanced, and not a weapon she'd use by choice.
He looks as though nothing has changed. Nothing has happened since she first saw him in that throne room. But everything is different, and she's stained beyond cleansing with this information.
Thor and Loki's parents are there, fighting him with sorcery and weapon skills that speak of more years of experience than Wanda can truly comprehend, trying to keep him at the Observatory. His ship hangs over the building, and the creatures pouring from it make the distant figures look like a wall.
Thanos is trying to make his way here, unable to land in the capital because of the glowing, golden shield Asgard has wrapped around it. But he's coming. Slow, but persistent, and coming.
She sees the flashes of the battle, even from a distance. The colors that brighten the sky from the Infinity Stones and Odin and Frigga's power mashing together in a deadly plume.
It rattles the air.
It makes her lungs hurt.
"...the big purple bad guy, standing on a rainbow," Pietro says over his comm, breaking her from her thoughts. Wanda ducks a stray blast from one of the creature's guns, sweeping her arm out to throw a handful of the four-armed beasts through the air.
"Ironic." Sam huffs in response. She can't see him. The only person close enough for her to spot within the battle is Asgardians, Loki, Thor, and her brother. She catches glimpses of Tony and Sam in the sky, but beyond that, the Avengers have been lost within the long, drawn-out minutes of this.
"Ha," Tony intones before adding, "any chance he's fighting with unicorns and glitter today?"
"Let's hope not, glitter's a pain to get out of hair." Natasha says without a trace of humor. Wanda hears several bullets, a grunt, then Clint swears loudly in response to a sound Natasha makes. "And just so you know? Bullets are crap against these things."
"Guys." Steve's voice breathless, but an anchor to twist around with its irritatation. "Can you focus?"
"No, she's right, Cap. Glitter is a pain to get out of everything." There's a pause over the comms, and the sound of a repulsor blast smacking into something before Tony adds, breathless, "It's awful."
"When have you cleaned out glitter from something?" Steve asks, equally breathless. He smashes his shield against something. Wanda hears the reverberation, and it's loud enough to make her wince.
Are they really doing this now? They're in the middle of a battle, and the Avengers act as though they're fighting over breakfast. Wanda doesn't know if she finds relief from this, or it heightens her anxiety. Something flings over her head and Wanda twitches, shoulders bowed and head jerking to follow it.
"Peter needed help with a school project. First and last time he ever darkens my kitchen with his homework again."
It takes Wanda a second to place the name to a face. Peter. Parker. The kid that Tony was babysitting when they went for Lila's party. Brown hair, soulful eyes.
"It's glitter, not a bomb." Clint says, grunting, "Half of me and Laura's floor is just the crap now."
"He set it on fire."
"Do I even want to know?" Sam asks with dread. Wanda sees him from the corner of her eye, smacking something out of the air in an aggressive tackle. He grunts loudly, straining. Hulk roars loudly in the distance.
"Probably not, but honestly neither did I. Kid's a chemical genius." Tony says that with pride, then yelps. "Crap. That was close."
Wanda tears one of the Outriders from the top of a building, and sees Loki decapitate another one a dozen feet away.
"Genius translates to flame?" Sam asks skepticism.
"No, glitter translates to flame. Genius and glitter should never mix. I know that now," he ends the sentence with a slight yelp.
There's a moment of silence, all of them breathless, hurting, and exhausted. This fight has lasted well over half an hour now, and it shows little sign of stopping. She wants to take a moment just to breathe, but she can't. Their increased talking, Wanda realizes belatedly, is a sign of exhaustion, not enjoyment.
"Looks like Odin and Frigga might need backup on the Bifrost," Steve announces before ramming into something. There's a clatter and he gives a small cry of pain.
Something surges over her head.
Wanda raises a shield up to block it, but there isn't a need. It's just Thor, gripping his sibling by the arm as they fly towards their parents. Thor drops Loki first before the sky darkens and lightning splits through the air with a boom of thunder loud enough that it makes her ears ring.
An Outrider smacks into her in her momentary distraction, and she fumbles against the claws trying to slice her apart. Her vision grays at the edges, and she can't catch her breath.
She remembers, abruptly, when Natasha and Steve started training them at the Avengers Compound, how heavily Natasha had emphasized the need to breathe when fighting. Wanda had found it difficult, and often caught herself holding it in anticipation of a blow. She thought she'd moved past that, but maybe the giant claws attempting to skin her is a responsible excuse to slip back into old habits.
"Thor's got it," Pietro replies, panting.
Wanda hisses in pain as she doesn't quite catch an arm with her power, and the claw rakes across her right shoulder. It sends her off balance, and she teeters for a moment between standing and a world at an awkward forty-five degrees.
Lightning explodes in the distance.
She thinks she sees a flash of green. Loki's magic.
Wanda whips her head up, staring towards the creature with narrowed eyes and releases a sharp expulsion of air. As it starts to move in for a killing blow, Wanda lifts up her hands and catches it with her magic between clenched fingers. The creature is heavy, and it knocks her back a step in order to hold it. Her arm throbs in retaliation.
Wanda lifts the creature up with one hand, and pushes out with the flat of her other palm. The creature goes careening backwards, slamming into a dozen of it's brethren with enough force several are thrown from the edge of the bridge.
She pants, breathless and aching, but an edge of panic swirling through her stomach.
She didn't realize she was that close to the edge.
She looks up, and she can see that Thanos's is close enough she can see his face now. Her body recoils with fear.
"Oh, good," someone says over the comms; she thinks it was Tony, but she's not sure. Her ears are still muddling through sound as if taking a contemplative stroll. There's a loud clatter, like metal smashing against something, and then an even louder swear.
"Tony?" Natasha asks, but her voice is pained.
Wanda must have missed something in her scuffle.
"I'm...okay. I'm—" he swears, and his comm goes dead. Wanda's body tenses up, and she tries to search the skies for him, but can see no familiar flash of red. Only the Chitauri warships swimming through the air, Thanos's soldiers braced against them. Asgardian vessels are retaliating, but the sheer numbers are overwhelming. They dot the sky like a colony of ants, swarming after food.
They're going to lose.
Wanda's eyes fall from the sky to the ground. Dead bodies lay strewn around her. Chitauri, Outrider, and Asgardian. There's no easy fix for this. She stands in a momentary bubble of freedom, but she needs to move. Has to protect the citizens, and keep fighting. Because it's her job.
She lifts up a hand to her bleeding shoulder, and lightly touches the area, wincing at the sharp burst of pain that shoots up through the limb. Her fingers pull away bloody, and the cloth to the black jacket she's wearing is torn. The wound feels like it goes to bone, and she realizes with growing apprehension that it might. The muscle is taut and aches in a way that she's scarcely felt before.
The pain brings tears to her eyes.
She feels like a small child, standing in the middle of a warzone, about to cry because her arm hurts. Pull yourself together, she chides herself. You're not fifteen anymore. She grits her teeth, closing her eyes against the pain for a moment, breathing in to ground herself.
A shout of pain catches Wanda's attention, even though it's distant. A voice more familiar to her than her own. Whipping her head to the right, she sees Pietro staggering as if he'd tripped while phasing—in the direction of Thanos.
Debil.
While danger is all around, nothing is actively attacking her twin, and his body language reads that he's as befuddled as she is.
Lightning crackles overhead.
Wanda hears an explosion over the comms. Tony has yet to make a re-entrance.
An Outrider's claws swipe to her side and she twists to avoid it, but the sore throb in her shoulder emanates throughout her body in an unnatural way. She catches the being with the familiar red hue of her magic and hurls it to the side. She brings her left hand up to rub more pained tears away. Keep it together. The tears must mix with the dirt, blood and who knows what else on her face, and she blinks to try to stop the stinging.
Bozhi moi, you are a child.
She inhales through her teeth, the chill of the air against the bone helping her focus. She swipes two Chitauri off their feet with a jerk of her wrist, then returns her attention to her brother.
He's on his hands and knees, crawling. Two Outriders are heading in his direction, looking vicious and blood-happy. The first one to arrive gets shoulder rammed as Pietro stands faster than the eye could ever catch, and it stumbles then trips backwards. Her brother collapses on top of the Outrider, laying in a heap for several seconds until the confused creature figures out what's going on.
One long, vicious claw attempts to sever her sibling in half.
But Wanda is ready. She was already moving when she heard his cry of pain, and she's almost reached him. Her hand stretches out and grasps her brother around the middle, throwing him backwards. She catches him before he can smack into the unforgiving ground, but the grunt of surprise he gives still makes her wince.
She shoves the second creature away, and his head smacks against a nearby building, cracking from the force.
There's no time for regret, or remorse.
Releasing her sibling, she grabs the Outrider with two hands and tears the creature apart. A spurt of blood and guts spills on top of her, her brother, and the Bifrost they've unwittingly stumbled onto. She coughs in disgust, and sees Pietro slowly wipe the Outrider's paste from his face with an expression of revulsion. The blood is gray and clingy, sticking to his face like mucus.
He meets her eyes from the ground, bloody, dirty, tired, but alive, and the only thing he says is "bol'shoye spasiba, sestra."
Thanks a lot, sister.
She huffs, the edge of a hysteric laugh threatening to tumble out of her. "Mne ochen' priyatno, brat."
My pleasure, brother.
Then Wanda notices the pain. The pressure. Like someone reached out a fist and squeezed her insides, letting blood leak through their fingers slowly. Her shoulder and her side, for all the pain it caused her, is minimal in comparison to this. She doubles over, coughing sharply in an effort to breathe. She spits out blood.
This pain has no central wound it emanates from, it circulates through her blood, the pressure building and pounding within her, like her blood is on fire. Burning her from the inside out, charring everything as it makes an exit.
A wail wants to escape, but she can't catch her breath long enough to let it. Her wide eyes meet Pietro's, the pain behind them reflecting her own. He feels it too. His nose is leaking blood, spilling down his lips. Her own is wet. She can taste iron.
Their eyes meet.
Infinity Stones.
The Tesseract and the Reality Stone are safely locked inside of the vault beneath Asgard. The only way for Thanos to reach them is to take the capital, and though their outward defenses are failing, his success is not perfect in that yet.
Which means…
Her eyes lift up, and she can see the distance Thanos has crossed along the bridge. Only Thor and Loki remain as heavy hitters against the man. Wanda doesn't know where their parents went. A part of her is afraid to ask.
"Wish this was glitter. Crap, that's gonna sting tomorrow," Clint grunts over the intercom, followed by some brief swearing.
"No, you don't." Natasha promises.
"Your shoulder," her brother murmurs as his gaze shifts down. He wearily shoves himself to his feet. She shakes her head, trying to straighten, but failing. A moan slips through her lips. It's the only coherent response she can give as she tries to gather herself together. She bites her tongue, and wipes at her face with her left hand, a mix between wanting to cry and tear out her hair.
The Tesseract sitting on the table between them was painful.
This feels like she's being yanked apart, atom by atom.
Both of their gazes are drawn to the electricity of the lightning storm that draws closer.
"Why do I have the feeling it will get worse if we get closer?" Wanda breathes, though it's more of a statement than question. She feels like an idiot for asking. There isn't a point. Both of them know it's not going to get better from here, but the extent...that's what scares here.
Loki said that they would be utterly useless against Infinity Stones, but he didn't say anything about them being torn apart.
She wipes more blood from her nose. Her vision is red around the edges. Pietro's ears are bleeding. When he offers her a weak attempt at a grin, his lips are shiny with blood, face ashen. Wanda feels watery tracks trail down her face, and she tries to hitch in a breath. But the rattling wheezes she's trying to pass for inhales and exhales are only making her vision gray and fuzzy at the edges.
She's going to pass out.
They need to move.
There's a loud crackle, and both of them whip their heads up as much as they can towards the bridge. Thor goes sailing out of the air and crashes somewhere behind Thanos on the Bifrost with a loud clatter. She hears the crystal shards snapping, even from this distance. Loki releases a cry of rage and shoves some sort of long weapon through Thanos's stomach.
For all the good it does. The man seems only annoyed by this, smashing his fist to the side of Loki's head. He tumbles, and Wanda's breath catches with horror.
No.
Stop standing there.
Do something.
Move!
MOVE!
But her feet are frozen, and the only thing she's doing is shaking and leaking blood everywhere. But the only thing between Thanos and Asgardian ground is her and her brother. They stare, and Thanos lifts his gaze up to meet them, the edge of his lip quirking at the sight of her.
A shudder runs down her spine, and terror fills up any space that's left.
Her brother rests a hand on her left shoulder for just a moment, blue eyes meeting hers and searching. And—and she knows, with a sudden clarity, what he plans to do. This isn't reassurance. It's goodbye.
She grabs his hand as he shoots forward, stopping him. It's moist from scratches he's collected over the battle, each bleeding heavily…he can barely stand. He's not in the position to be playing the protector, loathe her sibling would be to admit this.
"No. We go together." She protests; more thin, watery blood running down her chin.
Not this time. You're not running off on some glorified hero moment and getting yourself almost killed again.
Thanos will be faced down by both of their stupidity. Him and his freakin' Gauntlet.
Pietro tugs at her arm. "Wanda," he protests.
She straightens, holding herself as upright as she can. The world splits into fours and only merges into twos when she blinks several times. It still holds the red tinge. She holds his stare, challenging him. Protesting. "Bite me." She hisses.
Her brother's jaw grits with obvious frustration.
"Our purple rainbow princess is getting close, I can't get near," Tony shouts over the comms. For the first time there's a tinge, just the tiniest strain of distress in the multi-billionaire's voice. Wanda sags with relief at the sound of his voice. She'd thought…
She shakes the thoughts off.
"We can…" Wanda's voice is a whisper. She tries to talk louder, but the only thing that comes up is a bubble of blood.
Thanos gets closer. Loki and Thor don't get up.
The pain gets worse. Pietro grabs his stomach, and Wanda leans forward and vomits. There's no stomach acid, no bile, no substance. Just the taste of iron and a pool of blood beneath her. She coughs harshly, each one rattling her insides. Her vision whitens out and she grabs blindly for her brother.
"Kid, you got a bad hit," Natasha starts, before her battle cuts her off. Their protests are meaningless. Wanda and Pietro can go nowhere. They're pinned beneath the force of this pain.
Pressure expands in her lungs, pulling, pushing, as if something is trying to crawl its way out of her, and she—
I'm going to die.
—can do nothing but collapse to her knees, landing in the pool, coughing, shaking, and boneless.
Pietro makes it one further step before falling to her right, his form quivering. His eyes are clenched but he reaches out until he finds her hand squeezing it weakly. Her grip his just as pliant and feeble, but she clenches their hands together.
She waits for the moment that her heart will explode from her chest.
She pants, and her heartbeat echoes in her ears like a drum of warning: Death, death, death.
Thanos comes to a stumbling stop. His pace was by no means leisurey, but the lack of movement makes her head raise in his direction, confusion whispering through her. He looks like he smacked against something—at least, until he lifts up his hand.
The Mind Stone on his Gauntlet glows, becoming more blinding by the second, thrumming at the same frequency as the pressure tearing her apart. Thanos's hand is trembling, until his entire arm begins to shake and he grabs it with the other, shouting in wordless pain. He looks toward them in the midst of his agony, bellowing "You—!"
Wanda's wild eyes meet her brother's for a fraction. What the—?
The light expands, consuming Thanos from the glove, and Wanda sees the Mind Stone give a wavering whine before it splits into pieces, taking the psychopath with it.
The explosion is deafening.
Wanda feels herself get thrown, tossed in a moment of true weightlessness that makes her entire body freeze up with terror. When she lands with a clatter, her limbs aren't loose enough to take the impact well. She feels something give in her left shoulder and wrist, snapping cleanly. This pain on top of everything else is blinding, and leaves her shaking with pain.
But her body, filled with terror, refuses to remain inactive and die. She jerks upright, looking around. Waiting. Waiting for it to fail. For their plans to come unraveling. Because that's what always happens.
But Thanos stays gone, dead, and the Infinity Stones are nowhere in sight. The ripple of power tastes on her tongue.
Wanda pants, eyes scanning flicking over everything, looking for her brother and—
Her already thin breaths catch. No. She can't move, paralyzed, but feeling something push against her, urging her forward, to do something.
But she doesn't.
Loki is dangling from the Bifrost from the shockwave, Thor's arms wrapped around his forearm, grip desperate. She's not close enough to do anything, but too close not to hear them. Loki attempts to reach his hand up and grab his brother's wrist, but the awkward angle prevents him from managing.
"Don't let go," he gasps, panic evident, "don't let go. I'll fall."
"Not...not this time. I've got you, little brother," Thor promises, beginning to haul his brother over the edge. "I've gotcha." Loki collapses beside the edge, and the two of them just lay there, utterly boneless.
Wanda closes her eyes and holds her broken arm close to her.
It's over, she realizes dully. It's over.
She closes her eyes.
And gives into the black.
000o000
When she wakes later, her toes are cold. She's laying on something soft, and there's a blanket wrapped up to her waist. The room smells like the candle isle of a drug store. Her eyes are grimy, and she feels stiff, like she's been lying down for a long time.
Wanda blinks her eyes slowly open, squinting against the soft light. The ceiling above her is white with a yellow gleam from the witch lights. Witch lights. Asgard. A soft sound slips through her lips and she turns her head with effort, trying to find some other form of life.
The room is filled with cots, most with a body laying on top of it. She can spot the head of her brother's hair, curled on his side, and Odin and Frigga talking quietly in one corner. Natasha is sitting next to her brother's bed and gives her a slight lift of her eyebrows in greeting. The other Avengers are absent.
"Hey,"
Wanda raises her eyes up to meet Loki's. He's sitting next to her cot, hands folded across his knees, a book resting next to the chair's leg, but closed. She exhales softly in answer, blinking.
"Hey," she mumbles with half the syllables.
Loki's lip twists, grabbing something from off the table between her bed and the next. A cup of water. Wanda sits up with effort, taking the glass from him with gratitude. She spills most of it down her face instead of actually landing inside of her mouth, but the water soothes her throat.
She hands the mostly empty glass back to him. Instead of returning it to the table, he holds it in his hands, as if he needs something to do with his fingers. She blinks several times, lifting up the heal of her hand to press against her forehead to try and ease the pressure.
"Ugh," she groans.
Loki says without much tone, "Asgardian magic may be effective, but it's not without consequences. You'll probably have that for a few days."
It's barely beneath a migraine. She sighs with resignation, then releases her lower lip. "Are you okay?" her voice is still faintly hoarse, and she can taste an echo of iron in it. Her eyes tighten at the memory of the blood, spurting from her, the ache in her chest, as if her heart would burst out...Thanos…
What happened?
Loki's gaze is distant for a moment, lips pressed together. "I'm…" he falters. "Physically, I'm fine."
She nods. Honestly, after all of this, it's about the best she could ask for. "No...no lingering effects from the Thanos-thing." Her hand waves. Belatedly, it occurs to her that the sentence didn't make much sense. Loki seems to get her meaning anyway.
"No. We fought, but he didn't hurt me in any way that couldn't be healed," he looks into the glass, worrying his lower lip between his teeth.
Wanda plays what she can remember of the fight through her head again.
And keeps circling around the blood. And the Mind Stone. And…
Bozhi moi. Ya ne ponimayu.
She doesn't understand. She runs a hand through her hair and blinks sluggishly, trying to get her mind to catch up. To actually start working the way it's supposed to, not the way that it's wrestling her against. "What...what happened?"
Loki sighs, as if he'd expected the question, but that doesn't make him any more excited for it. He nods, hands shifting along the glass, tightening. "You and your brother...destroyed the Mind Stone."
Wanda's mind stutters to a stop.
Wait.
What?
"We…um...?" is her intelligent response.
"I believe I miscalculated," Loki murmurs, lifting his eyes to look up at her. "When you were under Thanos's captivity, I was charged with seeing if the Mind Stone had been successfully transferred inside of you. It hadn't. But the blood you produced from the Tesseract was obvious, I was just too otherwise occupied to notice."
"Notice...what?" Wanda asks with apprehension.
"You're not," Loki's expression flickers with brief frustration, as if unsure how to say this. "You're not...not the Stone. You and your brother are children of Mind, and it left a blueprint of itself within you. Being so close to the other Stones triggered some sort of...reaction from it, different from when it was singular. The Gauntlet was created to house Infinity Stones, and when you got close enough, it tried to take you. Collect you inside of Mind, with your blood, but when it couldn't...you and your brother simply...tore it apart. Thanos was sucked into the destruction. He was vaporized instantly. The Stones scattered from the force, somewhere across the universe now, like opposing...magnets."
Wanda sits still for a long moment, processing that.
Oh.
It...in a weird, twisted way, it makes sense.
But a part of her mourns, because though she didn't know where Vision's body was...she'd hoped…
Foolishly.
She closes her eyes for a moment, breathing in this knowledge, exhaling her frustration, denial, and tries to do the same with the pain. She and Pietro vaporized someone without even trying. They destroyed an infinity Stone simply by being close enough to it that it felt the need to connect them. It's...it's a frightening thought. How much power did the Stone really leave in them, that they survived when it did not?
"Oh," she intones, because she's not sure she has anything else to say. She looks towards her sibling. "Pietro...?"
Loki exhales, finally twisting around to set the glass down. "You've been unconscious for a week. Your brother woke up yesterday, and we finally managed to get him to lay down, so if you wake him, I will stab you."
Wanda's eyebrows lift.
Loki shakes his head a little, huffing faintly as if darkly amused. "There's no lasting damage, but the trauma your systems endured was enough to nearly kill both of you."
"That's why we're still on Asgard?" Wanda guesses.
"Bifrost travel would stop both your hearts. Not that my siblings haven't provided another method of transport," Loki sighs, rubbing the back of his neck. Wanda's head tips in question. His siblings. The Black Order? Here? Loki's hands toss out slightly in agitation, picking up on her wordless question, "They escaped after their mutiny failed. I...vouched for them. Their ship is awful, but I suppose you could commandeer it successfully back to Terra if you tried. Once they've repaired it, they're leaving."
The admission is quiet.
Wanda stares at him.
This man...she shakes her head with incredulity. They tortured him for years, and the moment that they seek a second chance he's ready to offer them. He forgets his family, but fights to find them with bared teeth. He snaps together, over and over again. A resilience that she can't begin to understand.
Loki rubs at his forehead, "Beyond a long length of meetings and putting the city back together, you haven't missed much else."
Wanda nods, lips pursed together. Battle aftermath is always messy, stressful, and yet oddly mundane. She drops her hand back to her lap, and they sit in silence for a long beat before she asks, "But otherwise...are you okay?"
Loki rubs at the palm of his left hand with his right thumb. Despite the agitated movement, his eyes are calm. The level of anxiety and desperation that swirled through him when she first met him is absent. He's…
He looks so different. He is so different. If she searches his face, she can see the edges of Nova there, but Loki's not...it's weird. He's...what's the word? Less closed off? Relaxed? Maybe...maybe steady. Yes, steady.
Which is a weird irony, because nova is an astronomical term that refers to a star that burns thousands of times brighter than it did before. Then it returns to its original intensity.
He's calming.
Returning.
"I'm adjusting." His voice is soft, "It's...hard. I'm glad to see my family, I am, but sometimes…" he trails.
"It's too much." Wanda says, relieved. He gets it. She felt the same with the Avengers. She probably still will, whenever she sees them next. Shared experiences, just more than she first thought. "Smothering, almost."
Loki's gaze looks far away. His hands clench. Returning. Both of them, Wanda supposes. Returning to what? Healing? The elements that make them who they are? Peace? Their families? All? Maybe it doesn't matter.
"But otherwise, you're okay?" Wanda presses.
Loki gives her a wane smile. His eyes lose years in the action, giving his face a youthful appearance. He looks...he looks good. Maybe not happy, but working his way there. Healing. Returning. A nova.
"My dear Wanda," his voice is smooth, but quirked with humor as he finishes, "when am I ever not?"
Author's Note: Quote: CBS Elementary S1.
Final page count: 281
That's all guys. What a journey. Wow. This story has re-written itself at least four times now, and is nothing like the original plan I had, haha. Thanks so much for your continued support and patience. This is the longest I have ever worked on a fic, so thanks for coming back. Stay tuned for deleted scenes, alternate scenes + the original 50+ pages of this story from 2017 in chapter 20 of "Avengers: The Rubbish Bin." ;)
Find me on Tumblr blog/GalaxyThreads. ;)
Love you all! ~ ;)
-LodestarJumper