Wanda

I got closer to the flat.

"Miss!" a police officer shouted. "That building is not safe."

"The exterior is structurally sound." I said, mapping out my first steps.

I knew that because the wreck was similar to our apartment in Sokovia when it was bombed.

Pietro and I were trapped for two days. With nothing else to do, we listened to the first responders, anxiously waiting to hear the progress of our rescue.

The exterior was structurally sound, they had said. The interior, on the other hand, was the tricky part.

I grasped the lowest beams and pulled myself up.

I was now a few feet in the air. I searched for a new place to put my hands and feet. Which was hard since there was splintered wood and glass shards everywhere.

"Need a lift?"

I looked down. It was the youngest Spider-Man.

He was going in too.

He offered me his hand as a stepping-off point to a higher beam, but the poor kid groaned when I put all my weight on the foot.

"How are you even climbing in those?" he groaned.

"You know, I fought Thanos and Ultron in heeled boots." I said.

Despite my stupid heel stabbing his palm, Peter hoisted me up. I swung myself onto a new beam, something very hard to do in a skirt.

I overheard our commanding officer shout from below.

"Holland! Maximoff! What are you doing?"

"Saving two kids, sir." I grabbed onto a pipe sticking out of the rubble.

"Leave it to the police!" he shouted back.

"That's what I said!" Loki said exasperatedly.

"The police won't be able to respond in time." said the friend of the crying mother.

Finally, I made it to the top of the debris. Peter climbed up to me.

We had a good view of the flat now.

The bomb had created a gaping hole of building.

I glanced back at the growing crowd behind us. I couldn't see Strange or the other Peters.

I strained my ears to listen for signs of life.

I heard faint crying.

"Is anyone there?" I called out.

"Help!" screamed a young voice. "My sister's hurt!"

I slid down the hill of rubble into the center of the crater like it was a playground slide. Glass shards and splinters cut through my clothes. A few odds and ends tumbled down with me.

Peter was still following.

Was it just me or had the wreck shifted?

I made it to the center of the crater.

My heart started quickening. Wait, was that a television? I felt so much smaller. I was hiding underneath fallen debris….

I gave myself a mental shake.

Get a grip, Wanda. I told myself. This isn't Sokovia.

"Are you okay?"

Peter's voice pulled me from a near-panic attack.

"Yeah….I'm fine."

"Help!"

It was loud and clear enough to find them.

Two kids were huddled underneath a beam that was so low, it pressed them into the ground.

For a split second, I thought I saw little ten-year-old Pietro. But that wasn't right.

The kids were blonde. The girl was younger than the boy.

"I can't breathe." the boy wheezed.

I wanted to comfort them. Tell them that this was all a dream.

But it wasn't a dream. This was reality.

It was the same reality that I faced when I was ten.

The reality where your parents are gone. You're trapped. And you can see a clock ticking down the minutes until you're rescued or you die.

I placed my hands underneath the beam.

"Peter, help me."

He helped lift it, taking on so much more weight than me. This had to weigh at least a ton, but Peter lifted it like a simple grocery bag.

Something caught my eye. My heart dropped.

I choked on a breath.

"Wanda, are you okay?" Peter asked with more seriousness than the first time.

"We can't lift the beam." I said breathlessly.

"Why?"

With a trembling finger, I pointed to the black object sitting underneath the low end of the beam.

A bomb. An unexploded bomb. An unexploded bomb that could go off at any time. An unexploded bomb that stopped us from saving the two children.

If we kept on lifting the beam, it would put more weight on the bomb. And it would go off.

My mind started racing. Bad memories were flooding in. Pietro and I were trapped for hours on hours.

"What if it's defective?" One fireman had asked in Sokovian.

"No. We need to treat it like it's active."

Pietro and I cranned our necks to make out more of their conversation.

Meanwhile, the Stark bomb continued to beep away…..

Peter's eyes wandered to a large slab of concrete behind the beam.

"Wanda," he said shakily. "Help the kids and I'll get the concrete out of the way."

I couldn't take this anymore. I wanted a way out of this.

"Are you sure? Maybe we should-"

"The police won't get here in time! Remember?"

We were their only hope and I had wanted to run away. How could I be a coward like that?

"No." I said. "I'll watch the bomb. It could go off any minute, right?"

"Wait, like what Cap did at Camp Lehigh?"

"Yes."

"Wanda, that was a dummy grenade! This is the real deal!"

The bomb was bigger than a grenade, but hopefully, covering it would work.

It would be enough for Peter and the kids to get out.

I bent down to the boy and girl.

"We're not gonna make it." the girl moaned.

I flinched. I had said the same thing after a few hours underneath the rubble back in Sokovia. No one should feel that crippling weight of despair and hopelessness.

She had a deep cut on her arm. Her ankle was twisted in a bad position.

For two days, I had thought I was going to die. I wouldn't let this girl believe the same.

"You're Ben and Wendy, right?"

They both nodded.

Peter knelt down.

"I had an uncle named Ben. I'm Peter."

"Peter's going to lift the concrete up and when he does, Ben, you take your sister and get out. Okay?"

I explained it to them like it was the simplest thing in the world.

And they nodded.

Fear flashed in Peter's brown eyes.

His expression matched my own twin boys' exactly.

I put my hand on his shoulder.

"You can do this. Okay?"

"But what about you?"

I smiled.

"I'll be fine."

He wedged himself underneath the concrete. I knelt down next to bomb. There was a literal explosive that could tear me apart and I just sat there.

"Now, Peter."

He lifted the concrete with a loud grunt.

"Okay, guys…." he panted. "Get out!"

Ben and Wendy scrambled out of the rubble.

But they stopped. They were waiting for us.

The bomb started ticking. So it was active.

"It's about to go off!" I shouted. "Get out of here!"

Peter managed to get out from underneath the rubble.

We scooped up the kids and dashed up the rubble mountain.

But to no avail….

KABOOOM!

I expected the ground to give out from underneath us.

Instead, wooden boards and pipes landed on top of us.

I grabbed Wendy and covered her with my body.

As chunks of wood and metal fell, I could hear people screaming.

Once everything calmed down, I realized we were under rubble.

We were stuck again.

I expected to stop breathing. To panic. To shut down.

But this time, I didn't.

My breathing stayed normal even though I could feel my lungs filling with dust.

Time felt frozen.

How long had we been stuck under here again? Seconds? Minutes?

Suddenly, a strong hand wrenched me from the thin layer of debris.

I might as well have been pulled from a churning ocean.

The white noise was gone. Time was passing at a normal rate now.

I exploded into a coughing fit, trying to expel everything that my chest had taken in.

There was cheering, crying, our commander officer screaming at us and…

I looked up to see who had rescued me and the little girl.

It was Strange.

"Easy. Just breathe. You're okay."

He placed his hand on my chest as I sucked in clean, fresh air.

Peter and Ben had been rescued by the other Peters.

"Dude, are you okay?"

"Yeah-Yeah. I'm…" Cough, cough. "Fine."

"Next time, let us help you. We can't let you have all the glory, you know!"

Loki was at Strange's side.

"Take her." I rasped.

Loki took Wendy with an expression that said this was his first time holding a child.

We got away from the wreck. My feet felt too heavy to walk like normal. I leaned heavily on Strange.

Ben and Wendy found their mother. She clung to them and sobbed grateful tears.

Then she spotted us.

"Mum, those are the people that rescued us!" Ben said.

Suddenly, I was pulled into a stranger's embrace.

"Oh, thank you! Thank you! Lord love you. You saved my children!"

"Our pleasure, ma'am." Peter wheezed.

Unlike Wendy and Ben's mother, our commanding officer was fuming.

"Agent Maximoff! Private Holland! What were you thinking?"

He continued to rant about our utter defiance of protocol while Strange was checking us for concussions. Soldiers and police officers shook our hands and said how brave we were.

I was in a complete daze. I felt too dizzy. I barely registered the weight of the canteen of water Strange gave me.

I couldn't even listen to what anyone was saying.

Maybe it didn't just feel weird because I had survived the explosion, but because of the trauma that I had carried around with me for years now.

All throughout my life, I couldn't shake away the pain and horror of being trapped in that Sokovian bombing. I bore that painful memory for so long, I didn't know any different. But here I was, alive and well, having braved an air raid.

This time, I rewrote the story for someone else.

This time, it wasn't a gripping tale about a set of twins trapped in a wrecked apartment for two days. It was about two children being rescued from a collapsed flat.

Yes, there were many horrible events like this one throughout history.

But I had just stopped one that hit too close to home.

Our commanding officer was finishing his rant now.

"While your active display of disobedience would grant you nothing short of a court martial-"

Peter and I finally looked up at him.

"You just saved two human lives. You have my highest respect."

The crowd clapped for us. My mind regained feeling again.

"Well done, Yanks!"

A reporter nearby eagerly scribbled down notes.

"Finally, I have something pleasant to write about!"

"Good show!"

I caught Strange smiling at me.

"What?"

He shrugged. "Good job. That's all."

"Alright! Alright!" the commanding officer shouted. "Except for Maximoff and Holland, get in formation!"

He glanced in my direction.

"You may be the heroes of the day, but we're not in the war yet!"

As Doctor Strange helped Peter and I to the side, the word hero echoed in my head for a while after that.

People considered the Avengers heroes. Not me.

To the masses, I was the Sokovian witch who caused a big building to collapse.

Ever since I got my powers, I tried to use them for good, but it just made it worse.

It seemed with every battle I fought alongside the Avengers, I messed up again and again. Our fight against Ultron was my fault. The Airport fight a year later? Also my fault.

I tried my hardest in the invasion of Wakanda, but failed with Vision having to pay the price for it.

Yes, I almost killed Thanos, but that was just me settling a score.

Don't even get me started on Westview.

But this was the first time I felt I genuinely did some good.

This was the first time I thought of myself as a hero.

Hey, guys! Thanks for reading!

I thought Wanda could use some more healing in this chapter. I know it's not obvious, but Peter is also having some flashbacks of the time in Spider-Man: Homecoming when he was trapped under rubble.

Hope you liked it!