Work Text
The fire dances between her palms. This has always been how her power has manifested, a balanced pressure between her palms, warm and almost alive.The fire dances between her palms. The flames flicker and lick at her skin.Wanda remembers. Once, when she and Pietro had been small, they’d sat beneath a tree in the park and watched the other children play.It was always odd, the push and pull of it. They’d both watched the other children as long as they could remember. They would rarely ever talk to them. There was too much risk in that; as children Roma and Hebrew accented their Sokovian, made them clearly outsiders. As they grew older they learned better to hide it - hide it so well they could hide unquestioned in a church - but then, as children, there was always a risk they would be shunned. They both wanted to talk to them, to play with them. Wanda wanted friends and company, people to share her life with other than family. Pietro wanted fun.The other children stood in groups and she and Pietro and watched as one girl pressed her palms together while a boy pressed his hands to hers and kept her hands from parting. After a minute the boy pulled his hands away and, in response, the girls palms … flew apart.“Huh,” Pietro said. “Do you think we could do that?”They’d tried it twice, first Pietro’s hands between hers, straining against the pressure she exerted, and then her hands between Pietro’s, straining against his.Pietro had felt nothing. She felt everything. The moment Pietro’s hands were gone from around hers she could feel it, an impossible, invisible ball of force between her hands. Pietro watched as she sketched out its shape, showed him where it lay between her palms.He shook his head. “I felt nothing,” he said. “Or… but only for a moment.” Wanda’s hands danced around the invisible shape for half an hour and even once they were at home and tucked into bed she could find it, fingers dancing above her body, finding the hidden strength waiting in the aether for her hands to touch.She wonders now if this was the first sign of their powers. When their parents died Wanda’s hands were stained with blood from staunching the wounds on her brother’s back.“Pietro,” she whispered in the dark, half her attention on the flashing light of the shell, half on the blood dribbling down Pietro’s sides where he had held the slats of the bed off them as the rubble crushed downwards.Once the rubble had settled he’d shifted, moved them to have slightly more space, and his back bled red.Wanda had focussed on his back, on his back, on the bleeding cuts. She held together the worst wounds until they slowed and scabbed, tore a bedsheet to shreds with her teeth for the rest.They took turns watching the flashing red light of the bomb. In the dark of the rubble it’s light was all there was to see by - just enough for each other’s faces, Pietro’s back, Father’s twitching foot in the chasm.The word Stark on the shell.They curled close as the rubble shifted nearer and nearer, as they heard the rattling sounds of bricks tumbling away.In the light of the shell Stark was painted on it’s side in red, Wanda’s fingers daubed in Pietro’s blood were black. The twins curled close, brow to brow, Pietro’s arms around his sister, Wanda’s bloodstained hands near their lips.
She could see the shell reflected in her brother’s eyes. She saw as bloodstained Stark turned pale and pure in the light of day.
Wanda remembers the taste of dust and her brother’s blood on her lips. Wanda had always had a knack for finding things. In the foster homes this was both a boon and a curse - always the one asked where something was, always able to find a hair-tie in time. Always called pikey , always accused of theft.One day as they left yet another such home, Pietro pressed something small into her hand.When they were safe in their room at the new place - yet another new place - she examined it: chain and ribbon and a single simple pendant.“Did you steal this?” she asked.It didn’t matter if he had, really. They were moving all the way across the city, they would never see the other children again. Wanda slipped the chain and ribbon around her neck, felt the pendant bounce slightly off her clothes.Pietro’s hand was gentle in hers, warmth chasing away the not-warmth-once-cold of the necklace.Every time he found her new things - earrings, rings, bracelets, the carnelian necklace so like Mother’s - his hand in hers chased away the cold bite of metal.Wanda remembers his warmth, and feels the lack. Wanda could feel the anger of the people, of the protests, in her palms. She shook her fists to the beat of it, chanted with them all. Pietro at her side followed her lead, trusted her understanding.This was rage, this was anger; fury at injustice done to them over and over. Fists raised, chants shouted, the sound of pounding feet and hearts over the cobbles of Novi Grad.There was fierceness here, and fearlessness, and something almost frightening in it’s fervency.Pietro at her shoulder, undaunted in the face of the police batons, unafraid of panicked screams.She remembers his hands on her shoulders, guiding her to safety. Wanda’s hands spurted scarlet, after the experiments, and everyone shied away. When her scarlet started to grab things, when she started to move things, they shied away more. Her mind stretched, scarlet moving, and everyone shied away more.The only one who didn’t was Pietro. He shook with blue, tense and uncertain as he tried to bind his speed to him, but he gripped her hands, unafraid of the tearing scarlet.“You won’t hurt me,” he said with certainty. “I won’t hurt you. We can’t.”Her scarlet, fierce and tearing when technicians came in, calmed. Her scarlet, capable of destroying anything she pitted it against, did not. It seeped out of her hands like blood, and Pietro lifted her hands to his mouth, and kissed her knuckles.“We’re all we have,” he reminded her. “All we have left.” His hands held hers tight, his knuckles white.The scarlet moved over them, like blood.And Wanda remembers that Pietro was completely and utterly unafraid. Her hands were stained with metal flesh, with oil as blood. Grime and smoke and brickdust. Almost like childhood, but for the fact she could feel the terrible empty ache in her chest where once she’d felt the echo of Pietro’s heartbeats. Her hands ached. Her bones strained. The scarlet in her blood pulsed with focussed anger.This wasn’t rage. This wasn’t sadness. This wasn’t anything but pain and pure and unbridled fury, all the fury Wanda had ever felt multiplied by grief.She stretched out a hand, and with her bloodied scarlet she pulled the heart out of the thing that had taken her heart from her.Wanda remembers power and grief, and the cold feeling of steel in her hands. Cold comfort, for what she has lost. (She remembers, too, just a little while after. She had not thought anyone would come for her. The one who had always come for her, always sought her out, was dead. But as she falls and Sokovia falls and the world falls around them, her hands find Vision’s vibranium arms as he takes her from death to safety.) Wanda spins the scarlet shut. Spins it gone. It’s a useful aid to meditation, a useful way to process out her thoughts and work out things she has no other way of piecing out of her skull.Grief. Loss. Memories of her brother that are too painful to face alone.“Wanda!” calls Lila Barton. “Come play?”Slowly, Wanda rises and makes her way down to where the Barton children sit in the grass.“Not play,” she says, “Let me show you a magic trick instead. Even you can do this one.”And she shows them how to press their hands together until they fly apart.No scarlet stains her hands.