Re-write connon divergent from roughly around the events of Age-Of-Ultron.
Broken block fragments and pieces melded together in jagged forms riddled the floor. Yet again she had destroyed them, and yet again she heard them approach with more. She wondered if they realized why she would constantly destroy them instead of gently caring for the toys as she once did as a child. Control. This was the one thing in her whole world in which she had any control, however slight it might be. She could control the blocks and break them, and in turn this would force them to give her new ones again and again and again.
Sitting still she stared straight ahead as the door in the wall hissed in warning. She forced herself to unfocus her eyes and steadfastly ignored the guard who stepped in, sweeping away the broken blocks and carelessly dropping new ones in front of her. As quickly as he arrived he was gone and Wanda was left alone again. Wanda, that was her name. Sometimes she felt the need to remind herself in the case she might forget she used to be more than a puppet toy.
In the next room over a boy, her own twin brother, Pietro, zoomed around, almost slamming into the walls while he tried to use his energy. He needed to move and he had to make due with the shoebox of a room that was far, far too small for what he truly needed. Pietro's very cells seemed to buzz, urging him to run. As much as he needed to run, it got old running back and forth in the cramped space. He shook and staggered and twitched, unable to crumple and stop, needing to keep moving moving moving. There was no rest for this boy and there hadn't been for a long time and Wanda desperately wished she could relieve the burden which was causing him such distress and tiredness.
On her other side was another girl, an older girl. Lorna, she sucked her teeth as she had to fight to pull the name from memory. It was much harder to remember. Lorna, she reminded herself, trying not to be angry with the feebleness of her own brain. In the next cell-like room Lorna sat quietly, legs crossed and hands on her knees as she breathed slowly and deeply. It was almost meditative. Lorna was volatile and sedated often enough that if Wanda couldn't always feel her mind and connect to her, no matter how faint that connection was due to the stress and drugs that were controlling them both, she very well may have forgotten her existence long ago. In fact, Wanda knew that's what they had all thought. They couldn't make her forget her twin brother Pietro, but they wrongly assumed that by keeping her under lock and key that Lorna had become nothing more than a figment of imagination to Wanda and Pietro.
Tremors ran up and down her body as awful sounding alarms blared to life and the walls quaked around them. Absently, she wondered if it were Lorna. She could feel the anxiety rise in the guards and desperately hoped they weren't coming around to drag away the green haired girl for either more drugs or another beating. This time when the doors hissed open, a voice beckoned her to come out and she was greeted by the thin man who was the boss. Weakly she stood and joined her siblings in standing in front of him outside of their individual prisons.
"You are going to take care of something for me." Pietro twitched next to her, trying to hold still and not upset the thin man, he knew from experience what the man might do to him if he failed to meet expectations. "You are going to take care of the Avengers." His grin revealed the same shark-like teeth that many of the guards seemed to have and Wanda couldn't help feeling her stomach flip in fear. This man had always frightened her, and though she knew her gifts were powerful, her fear was even more so. No matter how hard she tried to fight her fear, she was no match for it and it was debilitating, drowning, and consuming.
Without speaking further, guards stuffed them into some actual clothes and shoes right there in that dingy hallway. It would seem thin raggedy nightdresses and clothes ripped to shreds wouldn't be fit for their task. Making eye contact with the others Wanda tried to commit them to memory once more, her own so hazy that she feared if she did not take one last look they would be out of her grasp forever. Even moments ago she had almost failed to come up with Lorna's name. She knew one day soon she would forget who they all were, and would only recognize them by the strange connection that bridged between them because of her gifts.
Pietro sped off and with a clenched jaw, so too did Lorna, leaving Wanda in an empty stairwell as instructed to protect the thin man. Hiding she listened and watched as a strange looking man with stars on his clothes talked to the thin man. Captain America, he had said. Doing her one job she threw him down the stairs before stiffly slipping away with the thin man, his hand gripping her thin arm as though he needed to pull her with him even though her fearfulness of him was already doing that for him.
She had tried to keep stride with the thin man with her shorter legs, and he had finally gotten annoyed by dragging her along, so he let go and allowed her to slip behind him like a shadow, only stopping once by the rooms with the odd metal staff. She had seen it many times before. It was one of the few places she was brought to instead of having things come to her. A man stood there peering at it and the rest of the room littered with big shells and bodies. Aliens, she thinks they had said in muted tones they think she can't hear. A painful grip lands on her shoulder once more and pushes her forwards and with halting quiet steps she approaches the man with the glowing circle on his chest. Her throat felt thick as she raised timid shaking hands and tapped into his mind to see what he saw when he looked at this room, to see why these husks frightened him so.
In his head was death and destruction and she flinched away from it back into the shadows where he would not see her or the thin man. For reasons she could not explain her heart nearly stilled in anticipation as the man swiped the staff. Now he had the staff and its power, she couldn't tell what exactly was coming, only that there was something she was waiting for that would only happen if he took the staff. The first time she had seen the staff, she reached for it when it called her name, a soothing voice welcoming her home. She saw a yellow stone and the stone showed her silhouette after silhouette. Somehow she knew they were important, they were what was to come for her and she had eagerly grasped at them before she had collapsed.
She was pulled from her thoughts when he was gone and the thin man took her, retreating onto a hidden ship. As the ship powered up she worried over where the other two were. Relief filled her when Lorna and Pietro came back and finally joined them on the ship and they took off into the sky. Surrounded by metal and out of their cages, she could feel Lorna itch to make the plane crash so they could finally escape. She sent a wave of her own fear to her older sister, they were in the air already, how would they survive such a thing? Falling from the sky in a metal container would surely kill them. Lorna swallowed hard, taking a deep shaking breath to push away the idea.
The trio of children twitched and tried not to squirm in their individual seats on the bench. Wanda wanted to hold on to her brother and sister, hold on to the little fragments of her soul that were still left after all these years. Eyes flickered around the room to see how closely they were being observed. "Shift." her mind murmured to her siblings; they could shift in their uncomfortable seats just enough so that they could discretely link their pinky fingers between them. Their hands never left the seats while they slid ever so slightly to not draw attention. The small contact made them almost sigh in relief to know that this was real, they were right next to each other. It was a small comfort they were glad to have.
The trio no longer knew where they were or what to expect. The only thing they knew for sure? They were not going back to their cages, and not just because those people had stormed the place, no the three siblings finally felt hopeful once more. Escape was in reach, or at least maybe it could be soon, if only they could hold on to themselves a little while longer.
