Wonderland: fell down a rabbit hole, you held on tight to me ('cause...

Chapter 7: this love is back alive from the dead

When they returned to the Avengers building, Wanda's face seemed like it would be near permanently tear streaked, and it hurt to know that he might not be too far off. He remembered, back in Sokovia, thinking that maybe things didn't go right for her after he had died. But now, hearing all that she lived through in another life, he couldn't help but want to laugh at such an understatement of an assumption that was.

His sister had gone through so much, that she had lost the will to live so many times. She may not have said it outright, but he knew her. He knew the things she didn't say, like he was the mind reader. When it came to her, no matter how many years apart they were, or how many years she had lived without him, he would always be able to read her like he was the one with telepathic powers. It was a big twin brother thing.

She had always been the one, between them, with the stronger will. With the stronger need for revenge, and to stay alive, if just out of pity, and for revenge, to make sure that those who ever hurt her and him would pay. He would always try to give in, move on, because they were orphans, and homeless, and it was safer to just focus on surviving and nothing else, but she— she had never thought like that. When he was picking fights with bullies without a plan, and she would join in, and they would lose, he would accept his losses and give himself a pat on the back for even fighting back, but Wanda was plotting her revenge and making sure they wouldn't be looked down upon. And her plans worked.

But the Wanda he heard of, the story of the Wanda that grew up that he didn't know, that really wasn't the Wanda he knew, and not because she kept secrets, but because that Wanda had been beaten so much, drowned in the waves of relentless loss and suffering that this Wanda that grew up without him, had stopped fighting. Stopped plotting. Stopped trying to survive, even just for the sake of pity or revenge. She just stopped, and lost her drive, because her drive and need to fight and make sure others paid for putting her through pain had only put her through more.

The Wanda he knew was strong, to the point that he admired it about her, but the Wanda that grew up, while she gained power in the terms of magic—really though, wow. To think of his twin sister as some sort of legendary prophesied Ruler of the Multiverse, Scarlet Witch—she lost it in terms of the way she seemed to have lost her thirst for greater things and for payback, and instead settled for the smallest happiness, as little as she was allowed to have before it was taken away from her and that wasn't the sister he knew and grew up with.

And the worst part was that he understood. He would have lost the drive long before she did, in fact he did so already, in the past. After losing his parents, and seeing Wanda get hurt, he had quickly become subservient to the guards and the scientists back when they had volunteered for Von Strucker. Wanda, though, despite knowing that it would bring her pain, refused to back down. A simple curse word thrown her way about Pietro, and she had lashed out, like an animal, ferocious and wild and dangerous. She had bought down three guards, and another two when they were trying to subdue her. They beat her for almost three days straight, but she didn't stop glaring at them the moment they looked at Pietro wrong.

Pietro couldn't imagine living a sort of life like the one Wanda lived. Losing something every time she got a chance of something even remotely good, he wouldn't have been able to bear it. He wished he didn't understand her desire to die, after a life of pain, but he did. When he thought Wanda had died, he had wanted to die too. He'd only just lost his parents, had been homeless and orphaned for years, and thought he lost his sister, but that thought that he might be alone after all he had gone through, it had been enough to make him want to die.

If he'd gone through what she did, he was sure he would have gone insane and tried to end it himself. With a gun, or with a kamikaze mission, but then again, he thinks, as he looks at his sister, gaunt, sickly and pale, with dark bangs under her eyes and the sort of things she cried out last night. The amount of pain he felt when he had touched her skin during her nightmare and had been sucked in— it seemed that she had tried to end it. She had said it herself. Mount Wundagore, but even that didn't work.