Prompt: And all their world come crashing down.
Summary: When they gain gifts it is odd. Pietro - they say that is his name and it feels right, but he is almost certain there is a word missing - can run, but only so far and so fast. Wanda's mind is a grasping thing reaching out and out and out, and scarlet spinning wide and strong from her fingers.
Pietro is the only one of their group to trust her enough to let her practice on him, let her dance through his mind, turn its shattered spread of sand into a shining sphere of hard glass and to let her still his speed to nothing. They feel oddly comfortable with each other, and they're not sure why.
They are glad of it, all the same, some days, when they are able to rest together, curled into each other.
Notes: This is set during CATWS, for reference.
Warnings: Codependency, (Unwitting) Sibling Incest, Mindwiping.
i.
They had taken Wanda first. He heard them unlock her door, and walk her down the corridor, beyond his hearing. He hates this, separate rooms, separate training, separate everything. They do not understand, that they are twins, that they need each other, that they've never been without each other, that this is hurting them. He listens to Wanda's footsteps, light and soft, down the corridor until he cannot hear anymore.
ii.
He hears when they return, when they push Wanda into her room again. She doesn't look at him, through the window. Doesn't even try to glance, and when he knocks on the wall to get her attention she doesn't respond.
"Wanda?" he asks.
"Who's Wanda?"
Pietro sits in stunned silence until the soldiers come to take him away.
iii.
When they gain gifts it is odd. Pietro - they say that is his name and it feels right, but he is almost certain there is a word missing - can run, but only so far and so fast. Wanda's mind is a grasping thing reaching out and out and out, and scarlet spinning wide and strong from her fingers.
Pietro is the only one of their group to trust her enough to let her practice on him, let her dance through his mind, turn its shattered spread of sand into a shining sphere of hard glass and to let her still his speed to nothing. They feel oddly comfortable with each other, and they're not sure why.
They are glad of it, all the same, some days, when they are able to rest together, curled into each other.
iv.
They do not mean to, the first time. After the fight they had just survived - Pietro nicked by a bullet, Wanda almost concussed, the others with broken bones, and singed fingers and one dead - they cling to each other, cling desperately, press brows to shoulders, faces to necks, lips to lips, and come undone in each other's arms.
v.
Pietro is the only one they seem to trust with Wanda after that battle. He is her guard always, and the others are divided up, Cecil and Nicholas, Ursula and Hedwig, Casimir and Miriam, assigned to guard one another, to work as the core of a team with assigned soldiers to help. Wanda is taken to the site in Pietro's stable arms, and he sets up scope and stage in mere minutes.
Job after job goes swimmingly, people turned to their side with Wanda's scarlet, or killed when it fails with Pietro's perfect eye.
vi.
Wanda, one evening, is pacing in their safehouse and it worries Pietro. The job today had been bad enough, watching the Asset stalk through a street and cause mayhem, gunfire everywhere, cars crashed and collided… it almost reminds him of something, and he worries it has reminded Wanda of something. He runs through the room, shuts off all the bugs he can find, and sets them on the table.
"Wanda?" he asks, and smiles when her fingers stroke down his face.
"Memories," she says. "That's all it is. Some old memories I dug up."
Pietro watches her face intently, watching to be certain. "You know you can-"
"I can tell you. I know, Pietro. But you do not need to worry this time." Her smile is soft and certain, and he can feel the scarlet of her mind softly warming the fog of his worry into dissipating. "I promise," she says, and it is settled.
vii.
That night, when they are curled together in bed, Pietro waits in the bridge between their minds. Like everything between them the bridge feels right, like it is meant to be, and Wanda leaves it in place more often than not. He knows she can feel him waiting.
She offers him a hand, stretching from her end of the bridge to his. "Come," she says. "I will show you the memories."
viii.
Curled together beneath rock and rubble, two children, pale skin, dark hair, eyes watching a missile across the crushing chamber from them…
Fingers knotted together as they are told, "Wanda, Pietro… I'm so sorry. Your parents are dead."
Someone threatening Wanda, Pietro close behind: "Don't touch my sister!"
People following them from school, Wanda pointing one way, "That way brother. I'll meet you at the old church."
Pietro is still in bed when his eyes open from it, and he stares at the ceiling for long minutes. Eventually he sits up, looks to Wanda. "Check my mind," he says. "We have to know if its all true."
ix.
"We didn't know," Wanda says, and her hands comb through his hair. "We didn't know we were twins."
Pietro shakes his head, still burying his eyes into his knees, curled up as he is like a child. "We still. Wanda. Wanda, we-"
Wanda shrugs. "We knew we were close. We've always been close, always will be close, and them removing our memories, altering our loyalties and our personalities as they did couldn't stop that. They caused it. They didn't tell us."
Pietro looks up at her, tears in his eyes and Wanda remembers the last time he cried, when they were ten. "Do you think," he says, his voice as quiet as hers, "That I do not recall how we were, now you have gone through my mind? I know how close we were, but we were never… we were never this. We promised we would never be this."
The hand in his hair runs softly over his scalp. Wanda crouches beside him. "And we do not have to be now," she says, and he can feel her scarlet weaving around the branches of his tree, singing out i promise i promise i promise. "We know who we are. We know what they did to us. We can be ourselves again." In his mind the threads of her scarlet are bright against his blue and begging him don't leave, brother, please don't leave, please, please, please, i love you, you are half of me-
Pietro takes her hand. "I won't leave. I would never leave you."
He says the words just soon enough for Wanda's smile to blink away beading tears.
x.
It is easy, instead, to leave HYDRA. They may not have all their memories left anymore, but they have enough, and they have their training. They slip away, slip into the streets, and have Pietro's speed and Wanda's scarlet and their shared rifle when the helicarriers rise.
Project Insight Wanda recalls, and sends darting scarlet to search through the minds of those aboard. S.H.I.E.L.D. - fading, S.H.I.E.L.D. - fading, S.H.I.E.L.D. - fading, HYDRA, bright and bold and like a beating heart. Wanda finds its anchors and its foundations and rips it to pieces.
It takes three more people before that helicarrier crashes down.
xi.
Pietro gives her his memories afterwards, of the Asset fighting Captain America, and the red-haired woman, and the man with wings.
"They fought," he says and Wanda nods. "Maybe we should fight alongside them?"
Wanda smiles. "We'll have to find them first," she says. "Good thing I found their minds."
End Notes: Reviews are much appreciated!