Prompt: All that thou hast done.

Summary: Pietro feels it when they try to wipe his sister's mind, all the blinding light and pain as her scarlet flees from her great cathedral towards his tree. They watch from his end of the bridge as the façade is removed, the synagogue beneath crumbled and the dust blown out into a desert.

Notes: Yet another mindwiped/brainwashed AU.

Warnings: Codependency, Mindwiping.

i.
Pietro feels it when they try to wipe his sister's mind, all the blinding light and pain as her scarlet flees from her great cathedral towards his tree. They watch from his end of the bridge as the façade is removed, the synagogue beneath crumbled and the dust blown out into a desert.

Why? Pietro asks and Wanda shrugs.

They have been trying to twist us loyal from the start. Maybe they think remaking me anew will let them make me loyal, and make you follow.

Pietro considers his sisters thoughts. Will you return? he asks, and gestures towards the bleak expanse of what remains.

Wanda hums and shakes her head. I will watch, she says instead. From here, maybe closer to my mind. I will retake it if I must, and weave myself in, but I will watch, your mind and mine, and keep us from going astray.

In the bridge between their minds Pietro rests his chin atop Wanda's head, and breathes her in. Stay safe, he murmurs. No matter what, stay safe.

He knows Wanda is smiling with the way her scarlet is rising around them. I will, she says. And I will keep your mind safe too.

ii.
Watching Wanda - Wanda's body he supposes - return is terrifying to him. She is not there, and even with her presence in his mind is not comfort enough. Wanda breathes a slender string of understanding into the blank slate of her mind, and Pietro almost sobs when she hugs him.

What have they done? he asks, for all he knows the answer. What have they done?

iii.
Wanda watches the way they try to shape her mind anew, and builds branches which bend around her own firm principles. She will present loyalty, she decides, but she will not be loyal.

When she is not watching her own mind she is watching her brothers, watching his winds dance, his tree grow, his hummingbirds and monkeys move freely through the vast expanse of his mind. One day when she is sitting there Pietro pulls down a branch, and shows her the leaves filled with memories there.

You may watch, he says. You were there for most of them, after all.

Wanda smiles, and her thoughtform presses the lightest of kisses to his cheek.

iv.
Wanda spends a lot of time watching his memories after then. It takes little time and less effort to tweak the reforming mind within her brain towards her own shape, and so when she is free she pulls down branches and watches a memory caught in a great leaf. They are, much of the time, like her own, barring the emotions which accompany them, which are wholly her brothers. Silver-sharp and vicious joy, great grey-green gladness, anxiety blue-grey like twisting waves. Some are vague things, vague like dreams, or are dreams, and have touches of the red her brother has always associated with her in them.

She does not mean to find that memory.

v.
Trapped beneath rubble, watching a bomb. Two children, one curled around the other, and in Pietro's mind she can feel the pressure on his ribs as he holds the weight off her with nothing but his own self. The emotions filling him are a roiling mess, anxiety and concern, pain and behind it all the great grey backbone to all of his mind.

Protect.

Wanda is still too stunned by the memory to stop watching what follows, and cannot help but feel what her brother did as they were hauled free. Warm light, grey-green gladness, and safe safe safe,as he wrapped his arms around her again. He is not, she notices, paying attention to the medics or the police around them, and does not even note the childcare people who came after them all, beyond acknowledging their presence. There is a dull ache, she thinks, from his back and ribs, but Pietro did not dwell on it, so it is not strong. All there is is whirling greychoice, and Wanda watches as everything crystalises to blue when he looks to Wanda and decides protect.

vi.
Pietro has always protected her, that she has known, since they were ten, since their parents died, he had taken it upon himself to guard her before all others.

But know she knew the truth of it she could not stay back and watch her brother grow his mind along those veins again. She could see it now, the protective blue in his mind touching all things, subsuming other colours and burying them beneath the odd grey loam his tree grew from.

Why, she wonders, why, oh, why, brother would you chose to do that to yourself?

vii.
The weight of her own body shocks her, when she steps back into her mind, and remakes her rooms and chambers, arches and vaults. She steps back from the gun, lets it rest down and walks back towards the team trailing her. The techs do not know what to make of her change from placid compliance to watchful and wary, and Wanda sighs and raises a hand and lets scarlet weave around them and hold them still.

"I would like," she says, soft and sharp, "To see my brother."

viii.
They are not pleased but cannot stop her, and it is easy to send her mind arcing out to find his. Pietro? she calls and follows his blue towards him. We must go.

Pietro does not question, does not question at all, trusts her implicitly, that she has plan or knowledge or something yet else. They are at the church in town in the blink of an eye and it is not until he has set her down that he asks, "What now?"

Wanda sighs, and gently touches scarlet hands to his.

"Now," she says, "We fix all that has been done to you."

End Notes: Reviews are much appreciated!