Anamnapathy

Arrows flyin'
Into silence
Broken pieces
Lying around
Where it went down

It had been a month since Lagos.

Pietro got into a shouting match with Vision in the common room. Well, Pietro was doing the shouting; Vision, meanwhile, simply restated his point with more and more vehemence and floated higher and higher in the air in equal proportion. Louder went Pietro, and higher went Vision, until Wanda—about whom they happened to be arguing—made a strangled noise of distress and ran away to the dorms to hide.

Immediately, the boys were silent. Vision dropped back down to the carpet.

Steve, who had been watching the whole thing from the kitchenette, sighed and thumped his hand on the counter like a quiet gavel. "All right. That's enough."

Both of the boys looked varying degrees of angry and ashamed of themselves, and neither was looking at the other.

"Pietro."

"What?" the Sokovian boy spat.

Steve had stepped closer and raised a hand to pacify them, but he didn't appreciate the attitude. "Go for a run. Clear your head. I'm not taking no for an answer."

Pietro scowled and stuck his tongue into his cheek, his eyes darting around the room. For a moment, Steve thought he would argue or say something snarky, but instead the boy just bounced on his heels a few times and was out the door in a blue flash.

Well, that was easy. One down, one to go. "Vision."

"I'm...very sorry, Captain." The android stared puzzledly at the carpet, as if he didn't know where his outburst had come from, and refused to meet Steve's eye.

"It's okay. We're all stressed right now." Steve set his hands on his hips and sighed. At least this one was willing to apologize. "How about you go find something to take your mind off of it?"

"I assure you, I'm fine."

"Ah, no. If Pietro's not getting out of this, neither are you." A grim smile had sprung to his face, but it faded as he thought it over. "You've got paintings you haven't finished yet, right?"

Vision looked askance, then nodded. "Yes."

"Why don't you go work on those, then. And," he added with a sigh, "let me know if you see Tony's car."

"Yes. Of course." Still wrapped up in his thoughts, Vision turned and walked away.

"Thank you." He managed to say it right before Vision phased through the wall.

Steve groaned, rubbed the back of his neck, and stared up at the ceiling. This never got any easier. "Would be really great to have Barton here right about now," he muttered.

Bucky had leaned against the fridge and watched the whole thing with dark eyes. "I guess Lagos is getting to everybody." His voice sounded rough and low.

Steve sighed. Right. There was still one twin unaccounted for. "I'm gonna go talk to her," he said, and started down the hall to the dorms.

"Jus' tone down the Captain, a'right?" The voice didn't come from beside the fridge, but right behind him, at the opening of the hall. "It's Steve she needs to talk to."

Steve paused in his tracks, then turned around. Bucky stood there, the flesh hand and the metal one in his pockets, and half of a smile twitched up the side of his face.

"'Cause I know there's a difference."

It was so sincere and simple, said with his head tilted slightly so that the dark hair concealed part of his stubble, that it made a little smile crack on Steve's face in spite of it all.

"Thanks, Buck."

Bucky nodded.

Steve turned and headed down the hall.

The door to the twins' room was open. Steve was glad that he didn't have to knock. He could already hear the clear, stilted cadence of a newscaster's voice filtering out into the hall.

Wanda sat on the edge of her bed, bundled up in a sweater and shorts, and stared lifelessly at the television screen that glibly proclaimed her doom.

Steve found a spot on the doorway and leaned against it. Maybe if he folded his arms into his chest, he could make himself look unobtrusive and small.

There was a tiny snort from the hall. If not for enhanced hearing, Steve might have missed it. He turned, and there was Bucky, just out of Wanda's sight, mimicking Steve's posture and mouthing 'dad pose'.

Steve narrowed his eyes at him. He wasn't that old yet. And anyway, this wasn't the time.

Wanda had turned around, and immediately, she had one hundred and ten percent of Steve's attention.

She looked like she was about to cry.

Steve felt a small twinge of pain lance through his chest. "Hey," he said softly, but super-soldier lungs made his voice carry anyway.

"Hey." The tv blared on, like a parasite sucking the life out of her, and she looked so pale.

"You okay?"

It was more a question of permission to begin a conversation than anything else. On the surface, it was dumb to ask; obviously, she wasn't okay. That became still more obvious when she hesitated and turned back to the television screen, as if she had to ask it for permission to be okay.

"What authority does an enhanced individual like Wanda Maximoff have to operate in Nigeri—"

Steve scooped the remote off the nearby desk and hit the big red button on top.

The tv screen went blank. Wanda whirled around, as if he'd done something wrong.

He didn't apologize, just stepped into the room and resisted crushing the remote control in his palm.

He waded through Pietro's laundry, video games, and snacks before arriving at Wanda's tidier side of the room, and sat down on the edge of the Sokovian quilt that she'd spread over her bed.

"Turn it back on." Her voice was close to breaking. "They're being very specific."

"Nah," he said quietly, and tossed the remote in his hand. His voice was low, even if the words were light. She had to know that he empathized, but wouldn't let her wallow in guilt. "Whatever you think you're doing, around here we call that 'beating yourself up'."

The figure of speech probably would have been trite to anyone else who heard it, but it fell differently on Sokovian ears. Wanda seemed to think the mental image was funny, and huffed up a tiny laugh.

Steve smiled. He'd count that as a victory.

The tv screen was blank, but if he stared at it hard enough, he could still see the images of destruction and fire that they'd eagerly broadcast all month. He knew them well. He'd seen the same from the ground, with his own two eyes.

The wide windows to the outside offered a jarring contrast: green grass, a quiet forest, the Hudson meandering along, and if he looked closely, a blue blur speeding down the riverbank in the distance.

"It's been almost a month." Steve continued gazing out the windows. "Most of the people who survived are already recovering."

Wanda gnawed her lip and stared at her ankles.

Steve leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and offered eye contact. Whenever she was ready, she could reciprocate it. "So what's going on?"

Wanda peeked at him, wide brown eyes under the curtain of brown hair. The expression was familiar, and Steve wondered for a second where he'd seen it before.

Ah, right. D.C. Natasha.

But Wanda was not Natasha. Her eyes brimmed and filled with tears, and the red veins began to stand out against the white.

"They're afraid." Red energy crackled over her fingertips, the glow illuminating her face from below. "And maybe they should be…"

Oh. Oh, no.

She thought she was a monster.

There was a time when Steve would have agreed. When nightmares of the life he lost haunted him like the ghosts of the dead. When she was their enemy.

But that time was in the past. She was no all-powerful sorceress like they had believed, but a young girl, scared and struggling with powers that she didn't understand. He wouldn't let them grip her mind and twist it like they did his.

If she wanted to, she could have lifted him easily and thrown him into a wall. But he took a chance anyway.

Slowly, he hovered his hand over hers, curled his fingers between her thin little ones, and held her hand.

The red glow ceased. Wanda looked up, tears standing in her eyes.

Steve's smile felt thin. "Did I thank you for saving my neck and Bucky's yet?"

The brown eyes widened. A tiny laugh made the tears escape and trail down her cheeks. "Maybe a million times."

Steve couldn't help but laugh. He could remember at least a dozen instances himself, and there were probably more. Boy, are you predictable, Rogers. But he regretted nothing. "Yeah. Well, I mean it."

She smiled, bit her lip, and stared at her ankles again.

It was a start. Starts were important.

Steve took a moment to collect his thoughts. He knew how she felt; he'd been young and green once too, and realized for the first time that his actions held lives and deaths in the balance.

It made him feel small and half-naked to recall, but maybe that's just because he really had been that way in that Project Rebirth chamber.

"This job…" His voice was light at first. "We try to save as many as we can." It dropped slowly, as he slipped back to that unhappy place. "I had to come to terms pretty quickly with the fact that we can't save everyone."

Wanda seemed to have forgotten her tears. She didn't ask him to explain, but her expression did it for her.

Steve leaned back and sighed through his nose. "There was a shooter. HYDRA sent him to get the serum. I guess he waited to see if it would kill me first. When it didn't—when I got this," he clarified, gesturing at his bicep, before his eyes went dark, "he stole it. Shot up the whole room. Shot Dr. Erskine."

His voice still caught on the man's name.

The kind old doctor hadn't managed any dying words. The bullet had pierced his lungs, and didn't allow it. But he did have the strength to tap a finger on Steve's chest, pointing right at his heart, and the message would be forever burned in his mind.

Steve had never known his father. He'd died in the Great War before Steve was born. But he hoped—if with an Irish accent instead of a German one—he would have been like Dr. Erskine.

Wanda squeezed Steve's hand between both of hers. She looked quiet and sad.

Steve managed a tight smile and patted her clasped hands. The lump in his throat hadn't gone yet; that would have to do for thanks.

When he finally spoke, it was only after a deep breath. "Would have been easy to be down on myself about it. Would have been easy to say 'if only I'd known', 'if only I'd been faster', 'if only, if only'..."

He shook his head, then lifted it. "I didn't know. Couldn't have known." After a moment, he stared out the windows again. "If we can't accept that, and go on in spite of it...maybe next time, nobody gets saved."

Wanda was calm now. She scrubbed her drying tears with the sleeve of her sweater. "The shooter," she asked, her accent still thick. "What did you do?"

Steve thought of the windows he smashed, the cars he dented, and the roads he awkwardly tore down to get that guy, and it made a chuckle rise in his throat. He leaned back and answered with a smirk, "I ran out and caught him."

Wanda stared at him. Then, for the first time in almost a month, she brightened up, and really, truly smiled.

Vision phased through the wall. Steve tried not to jump, and Wanda gasped.

"Vision." She sounded half-indignant. "We talked about this."

"But the door was open, so I thought—" he began, gesturing to it, before Wanda gave a barely perceptible shake of her head.

"Well." He seemed a bit sheepish and defeated. "Captain Rogers wished to know when Mr. Stark had arrived."

Steve nodded and gave Wanda's hand a final squeeze before he stood. "Thanks, Vizh."

With a blue blur, Pietro stood in the middle of his laundry, his hand in a cellophane bag. "Got someone with him," he said through a mouthful of doritos.

Steve frowned. "Do you know who it is?"

Pietro shrugged. "Didn't get a good look."

"I did," interjected Vision. His voice became grim. "It's the Secretary of State."

Steve snuck a glance at Wanda, who turned away. She wasn't in any shape to face a politician right now. Unfortunately, it didn't look like they had a choice.

Bucky leaned in the door, the expression on his face the same foreboding one that meant either the butcher's kid was about to pick a fight or somebody had died.

Vision and Pietro had exchanged a few electrically charged glances, but neither seemed interested in picking up the argument now. "I'll just," Vision said weakly, and started walking, "use the door."

Oh, boy, they were in for it now.

A/N: I liked the concept of Steve giving Wanda some fatherly advice, but I feel like the execution could have been better. Wanda strikes me as the kind of person who connects more with stories than with bland platitudes. And Steve is an old WWII vet. Of course he has stories.

Also Pietro, because even when Pietro is making everything worse, he still makes everything better. Fight me. You won't.

EDIT, 1/14/21: Upon realizing that there is no word in the English language for "feeling what someone is going through because you've been there yourself"—empathy and sympathy come close, but don't mean exactly that—my friend and I came up with our own word, "anamnapathy", from the Latin words for memory and pathos. That is now the name of this chapter, because that's what Steve is doing.

Special announcement below! The lyrics at the start of each in chapter in this fic are from tobyMac's song "Family". Reviews are remote controls.

What is PROJECT REMEMBRANCE?

Glad you asked!

So I'm sure y'all have noticed I've been on hiatus for a while. There are multiple reasons for that, including but not limited to focusing on my original writing and the CoronaVirus epidemic messing my work schedule up. But a large portion of the reason for said hiatus is just a lack of interest.

I hate to say it, but I've kinda fallen out of love with the MCU.

Most people—who are not me—would probably just drop this and move on. It's been done before. Fanfic isn't my job, and I'm not obligated to deliver on the story list on my bio.

Except I kinda am. 'Cause I made a promise. And unlike SOME PEOPLE *glares at the MCU*, I actually KEEP my promises. AHEM.

So Project Remembrance is a plan to finish what's left of the Remembered AU in a streamlined fashion. These Civil War fix-it fics will be the springboard for a lot of other fics—you'll understand why when I get to it. Next up will be the Infinity War and Endgame fix-it, which will springboard yet more fics. So when I ask for feedback in the A/Ns, please let me know if you're interested in the side stories I'm pitching! It will go a long way towards me actually having the motivation I need to get those stories out if I know they'll have an audience right out of the gate.

I'll be honest that I don't know what's gonna happen after I finish the Remembered AU. Maybe I'll come up with other AUs. Maybe I'll write for canon (ahahaha). But I do know that I want to finish what I started.

If you've read this far, thanks so much for your support. It's really because of you guys that I stick around and keep doing this at all. I know the Remembered AU isn't all that important on the fanfic sphere, but if it can make just one person's day better, that's enough for me. So I hope you all will excuse me for being dramatic.

Welcome to PROJECT REMEMBRANCE. We're finishing this once and for all.