FIC: we'll see how brave you are (MCU, wanda gen, pg)

[carlyinrome]

we'll see how brave you are

Post-Civil War. Wanda comes to America.

Pietro is not the older twin anymore. Wanda caught up with his twelve minutes in Sokovia, Ultron’s heart in her fist. By the time she'd reached the boats, she was hours older.

She cannot count the hours. At first there was a number in her head, every day she outlived him. Now her life is too chaotic to keep up the tally. Days bleed into each other; time zones confuse the count.

She keeps things for him, though. She remembers sunsets over the ocean in Africa and monkeys in cages lining bazaars in Morocco, things he would want to see. She is working on controlling her powers even more, and she smiles when she perfects an act. She can't wait to tell him, to see him roll his eyes dramatically even as his face is filling with pride. “My little sister,” he'll say, “The witch.”

***

They bind her arms, slip a needle into her neck.  The medicine is warm under her skin and takes effect almost immediately; Wanda’s vision blurs and she can feel every part of herself weaken.  Her muscles are limp; her mind is fuzzy.

She wants to scream, but the muscles in her throat are too soft; there is not enough air in her lungs.

***

Wanda pulls her knees to her chest, pulls the bill of her hat down over her face.  She sits in the back of a pickup truck with wood planks built up in a sort of cage around the bed.  It’s made for livestock, she thinks.  She squeezes into her seat on an egg carton between the other five people sharing the truck bed.  They don’t speak English, and she doesn’t speak Chinese.  They can speak to each other, but they cannot speak to her; she cannot speak back.  She is alone in the crowd.

The men driving the truck are called snakeheads, and it is their business to move people across borders.  Wanda has paid them eight thousand American dollars to get her into the United States.

She has been a fugitive before.  But never before has she been alone.

Snow filters in through the cage, stinging Wanda’s face, melting on her clothing.  She hears the teeth of the woman next to her chatter.  Wanda pulls the layers of her clothing closer against her, pulling her sleeves over her raw fingers, balling her hands at her sternum.

They are not communicating.  Wanda misses having the other Avengers’ voices in her ear, misses being able to speak and reaching them all.  She misses—she misses a lot.  Now information is on a need to know basis, and all Steve thinks she needs to know is her own piece of the puzzle.  There is a little black box—a drive, a little box full of a lot of information—in a facility in New York.  Steve finds the information contained within critical, and wants her to retrieve it, but he leaves out the part of the order that reads, before they do.

Wanda’s parents had died suddenly.  One moment they were a family; the next, she and Pietro were orphans.  The family had severed—literally blown away—but it had been so fast, it was like the wound cauterized immediately.  The wound was still there, and the pain—oh, the pain—but there was no chance of gangrene, no chance of blood poisoning.

This time, the blood had been poisoned.  There was no telling how far the necrosis would spread.  What parts of the family would die.  It spread and spread; it affected everyone.

She wonders how much of what Ultron started is her fault. He had set out to destroy the Avengers, and here they were, destroyed. It's just that she hadn't expected to be among the casualties.

***

The fallout from the prison break is minimal; at least, it's not on the news. She knows that keeping a low profile is key, though, but she's used to using false papers and keeping her head down.

She just wonders how long she'll be on Interpol’s list. Wonders if it's a kill list. Joining the Avengers has bumped her up into a sudden spotlight; she has spent most of her life in the shadows, tucked away in secret labs, and now her face is in databases and what she's done is in archives--media and government alike. There is some coverage of the funerals on television, and the ache in her chest grows more profound every second.

She thinks of Vision in his sweaters trying to cook for her, and Tony showing her how the earpieces work, and Natasha taking her to put flowers on Pietro’s grave. She thinks of Rhodey falling from the sky, and how once he held her in his arms as they soared up to the heavens, the feel of the thinning atmosphere on her skin, how she lost her breath a little.

She has been on her own since the prison break, except for the occasional message from Steve, coded in Hawkeye’s subtle spywork. She translates the code slowly, by hand, transferring the letters in graphite from one page to the other.

She thinks of the Cold War. Maybe it will be like that, she thinks. Fear and nuclear deterrents until the tension finally breaks.

Or it could be like Hiroshima. There's no way to tell until this game of chicken comes to a head.

Wanda tries to sleep on the steamer across a foreign ocean, but the rock of the waves just makes her sick. She stays in the hold, in the dark with the strange whisper of conversations in Chinese. The magic coils around her fingers, but there's nothing to put it to. She does it simply so her hands don't feel so empty.

The boat docks in San Francisco. The snakehead wants more money. She can get it, but she's tired of being pushed, so she pushes back. The red energy wraps around him, and he is in the air, eyes widening, a string of pleas and expletives falling from his lips, half English and half Chinese. Sometimes she still thinks in Russian. She slams the snakehead against the metal hull, hard enough that he loses consciousness, and she walks toward the glowing lights of the city.