Chapter 28 - Pietro

January 12, 2014 - 5:45 a.m.

When Pietro was a child, some other boys had dared him to throw stones at a wasp nest. Of course, he had done it. And when the swarm came boiling out, they looked just like the drones coming out of the carrier. He had run then, but not fast enough to avoid the stings. They got him twice. Wanda had been very unsympathetic, he remembered.

At least I'm faster now, he thought.

He was taking a jog down Constitution Ave., barely faster than the traffic. The sky was still dark. The farther the drones went from the carrier's own lights, the harder they were to see.

Where are they all going? Pietro wondered. So many…

There were thousands of names on the list, the Black Widow had said. The drones were probably fanning out all over the city - all over the state! How big was this city...state? This country was so excessively large...

Just one, Pietro. The Captain's voice in his memories. He had to focus.

Pietro sped up. The parks to his right blurred into shadow, headlights and streetlights smearing across the darkness. Traffic slowed to a crawl. The sleepy pedestrians froze in their tracks, some still looking at their phones, some beginning to look up, their eyes widening in confusion and shock. In the sky, the drones were still moving, inch by inch by inch. And then, a blossom of white light.

They were firing missiles.

"Focus!"

His grandfather's voice was like the crack of a ruler on a desktop, like Pietro's teachers had always shouted at him for daydreaming before the bombs.

They were in a warehouse outside Paris, empty except for themselves and a heap of metal fragments ranging in size from a hex bolt to a car door. Pietro had been dodging them...more or less successfully...before he got distracted and a hubcap had smacked him in the elbow.

"Maybe some additional...challenge...would help you concentrate."

Grandfather held out his hand, and a golden coin floated above it, glittering, then spun away to join the rest of the fragments, gently turning in midair.

"Catch the coin."

"The Golden Snitch!" Pietro interjected with a laugh.

Grandfather raised one eyebrow.

"Harry Potter?"

He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed.

"This is important, Pietro. Please try to concentrate."

Grandfather looked up, and Pietro could almost feel his attention turn back on. Grandfather never had trouble with focus, that was obvious. The kaleidoscope of metal began to turn, and he would keep it dancing with his mind alone.

"Why didn't mom ever talk about you?"

The shards hung in the air for a moment, then settled on the ground like fallen leaves. His grandfather didn't look at him, but the skin around his eyes tightened with old pain. Pietro hadn't thought before asking the question, and now it was too late to take it back. He squirmed as his grandfather waited in silence.

"I'll tell you," he finally said, shards whirling up into the air like a storm. "When you win."

How fast are those things going?

Pietro darted left, and left again, circling downtown, townhouses a shadowed blur around him. He'd sped up. Now the drones hung still in the air, but the missiles were still moving - he could see at least eight. How fast would he have to be to get them all? Or even more than one? It was a moot point - they were all too high in the air; he couldn't reach them like this. He'd have to stop. To let them get closer to the ground. He'd be cutting it close.

No other way to do it.

He slid to a stop, a whirlwind springing up around him. A woman who'd been opening her car door yelped and dropped her coffee as he appeared, but his eyes were on the sky.

The missiles in the air raced toward the ground.

One.

Six more puffs of white flame.

Two.

Someone screamed. Pietro clenched his fists. Closer. They still had to be closer.

Three.

Pietro hadn't won that day, or the next. But finally, after many, many scrapes and nicks and bruises earned from his loss of concentration, he had run fast enough. The shards seemed to hang in midair, his grandfather frozen, hand outstretched. The gold coin glinted between a butter knife and a car bumper, and it was child's play to jog over and and grab it.

"Ha, ha!" Pietro laughed triumphantly as he slid to a stop in front of his grandfather, brandishing the coin in front of his face. "Spill, old man!"

Grandfather's old face softened, just slightly, and he plucked the coin from Pietro's hand and tucked it into his coat pocket.

"Alright," he said. "But not here."

The nearest missile was heading for a large, glass-walled building that could only be a hospital. Pietro sprinted past steel-framed structures, half formed skeletons in the darkness. He cleared a wire fence with ease and ran across the little pond between him and the building, spray hanging in the air behind him like jewels. The hospital's zigzagging windows glittered, reflecting the streetlights, the stars...and the missile's blank nose as it closed in, bit by bit by bit.

Pietro ran up the wall, his footsteps making ripples in the glass, like the ripples on the pond. He sped up as he reached the missile and pushed it with all the force of his acceleration, turning it up to the sky, away from the building. It was harder than he'd expected to overcome the missile's own velocity. And it had cost him time. From the roof, he could see the others, all over the city. Thirty...no, fifty at least. There was a white flash ahead - one was already touching down. He clenched his teeth.

Faster.

Grandfather had taken him to a cafe, bought him a sandwich, and then when he saw how fast it was disappearing, bought him another. He'd still been knobby-limbed from years of uncertain meals. There was a little cut on Pietro's wrist that he hadn't noticed, already scabbing over. It itched.

"Your grandmother…" Grandfather put down his coffee cup. "Could see the future."

Pietro raised his eyebrows. Whatever he had expected, it wasn't that.

"Not much at first," grandfather continued. "Things that were just ahead. But then, the older she got, the more powerful her...vision...grew."

His eyes were unfocused, looking inward at something only he could see. Pietro scratched at his scabbed wrist uncomfortably.

"It was too much for any human being. The visions overwhelmed her. In the end," grandfather looked down at his plate. "In the end she took her own life. Your mother never forgave me."

Pietro's leg jittered under the table, rattling the cups. He regretted asking.

"I...I'm sorry."

Grandfather waved his apology away.

"Wanda is like her." At that, his steely blue eyes focused again, pinning Pietro to his seat. "Except for one thing. She has you."

"Me?"

His grandfather leaned across the small table and seized Pietro's wrist.

"You need to be strong, Pietro." Grandfather shook his skinny arm. "But not here."

He poked Pietro in the chest hard enough to bruise.

"Here."

Pietro swallowed, mouth dry.

"The power comes from your will, not your body. Do you want to protect your sister?"

He nodded mutely.

"Do you?"

"Yes!" Pietro's sister was his life, of course he wanted to protect her. He'd do anything for her.

His grandfather sat back, nodded, picked up his coffee cup again.

"Good."

The explosion wasn't far away, thank goodness. Pietro ran across a cloverleaf intersection, jumping over cars, and past an enormous blue-domed church to the grounds of a college. The bomb had pierced the second-story window of a grey stone building that would have looked at home on the Hogwarts campus, the white flash he had seen from the hospital roof growing, a heart of yellow-red waiting to emerge.

Shit, shit, shit…

He ran through a first floor window and up the stairs, too fast to get cut by the glass. The corridor's ecru plaster and narrow, numbered doors meant this was probably a residence hall.

Shit!

Ahead of him, a door was already coming off its hinges - that was where the missile had come in. Whoever was in the room was already dead - it was too late to save them from the shock wave, but the bomb would take a chunk out of the building fifty feet wide, and these rooms weren't that big.

Pietro sped through the rooms on either side and across the hall, working outward, racing the blast wave as it blossomed into flame, finally clearing students from the floors above and below, depositing them confused and half-asleep on the brown lawn, far enough away that the glass and rubble, already spinning away from the building like dandelion fluff, wouldn't strike them.

More time lost. Another flash, this one across town.

Not fast enough.

But he tried to get there anyway. On the way, he pulled a young man out of his car as a missile touched the roof, pushed another missile up and away from a sleepy Motel 6, and cleared a janitor and four office workers out of an angular white building as another detonated. As he deposited the last gray-suited bureaucrat on the sidewalk he saw another flash. There were too many. He'd never catch all of them.

You could have stopped this before, a little voice whispered in his mind as he raced across the Potomac, too fast to sink into the water. More bombs were falling among the houses and apartments on the other side. There was no time for that. Grandfather, Wanda...he'd wanted to protect them. He'd never really thought it would end with Pierce bombing a hospital, or a school. Besides, he could stop it now - if only he could go a little faster.

The power comes from your will, grandfather said in his mind. Pietro clenched his teeth. I will make it right.

The missiles slowed down until they stopped. Pietro pushed them from their targets, snatched people from their paths, but there were more, always more. He thought he saw Rovshan amid frozen flames, carrying a woman with blood on her face, but he couldn't stop. There were too many.

Faster.

He couldn't hear anything but his own heart. The buildings around him seemed oddly squeezed, proportions shifting. His heart was rattling in his ribcage like it was trying to get out, his lungs were burning, his brain was pulsing inside his skull, his eyes vibrating in their sockets.

Faster.

There was a high-pitched whine in his ears, now. He only had to tap the missiles now to send them spinning up into the sky. As he passed cars, the windows shattered. He could see the fractures spreading on the glass like frost. How many left? How many? Not fast enough…

Suddenly pain ripped through his head. He lost his balance. The ground shifted beneath him as though the earth had suddenly stopped rotating; he was flung into the air, unsure what was up or down, until something hard smacked into him like a train.

Pietro's whole body hurt. His heart was hammering and every breath was painful. He realized his face was wet. Had he been weeping? Pietro wiped his eyes. His hand came away red with blood.

He could hear sounds, as if from underwater. Explosions. Sirens. Screams. He tried to get up, but his left leg was bent in the wrong direction.

"Fuck," he croaked.

Someone dropped out of the sky in front of him, and Pietro was certain he was hallucinating, because it was an angel - an angel with dark skin, and black, angular wings. The wings folded and the man stooped down, saying something.

"I can't hear you," Pietro said. "If you've come to take my soul, it'll have to wait."

Then he started to laugh, because at that point, what else was there to do?

Pietro, Pietro...I love this kid. Had a lot of fun writing his chapter - and watched many episodes of The Flash for inspiration, lol. You may recognize a cameo there at the end. i'm hoping to bring him in for the next volume. :-)