It was kind of an exclusive club: Eastern European former antagonists that the Avengers scooped up and half-adopted like a set of strays. Yelena's route had come through Natasha, and Pietro and Wanda had largely come through Clint, and since the two former SHIELD agents were best friends, it had been easy enough for their younger recruits to gravitate to each other, be assigned together on missions, find their footing together. And when the twins had first said something snarky to each other in Sokovian during a team meeting, thinking they had free rein— Yelena had barked a laugh, and the two of them had shot a startled glance at her, and an unspoken understanding flickered through them.
Yelena's Red Room training had meant picking up language after language to operate across Europe, a casual familiarity with Russian and English and Sokovian and Finnish and German and others. She couldn't float things with her hands and she couldn't run around the city in the blink of an eye, but she was a former trained child assassin, and yet she had an easy, laissez-faire demeanour despite her brutal upbringing. And all three of them were orphans misled by HYDRA or controlled using technology cribbed from HYDRA: sharper, darker origins than those of the Avengers' group who'd simply been bitten by a spider, or stolen someone's shrinking suit.
So, they'd become friends.
Today, standing outside the local carnival set up on the city outskirts, the short blonde is doing limber stretches in the parking lot as she waits for Pietro to show up. She doesn't have to wait long— timeliness is, of course, one of his strengths.
The friendship between the twins and Yelena was likely inevitable at some point. A bit like kids growing up with parents who were friends— you hang around someone enough, eventually the friendship just sort of happens. Pietro particularly enjoyed Yelena’s brand of sass that she brings along everywhere she goes.
He hasn’t been to a carnival in years. A decade or more now, he supposes. Back when he was young and his parents were still alive. It’s an odd feeling, that sort of reminiscence isn’t something he allows himself often.
Pietro is a blur of motion before pulling himself to a short stop next to Yelena. “Do you always do yoga in parking lots?”
“I do yoga wherever there’s space, Maximoff.” Unfussed, she tilts to the side; leans down and touches her toes; glances up at him from the bend of her knee. “I have done yoga in a creaky attic in Siberia, and in a dark warehouse in Bolivia, and in your kitchen. It helps to stay limber, you know. You never know when you might need to jump into real action, even at a carnival. And don’t you ever get cramps?”
To illustrate, she swats at his leg. Pietro automatically sidesteps long before her hand even gets close to him, though, and she snorts in amusement before straightening with a long stretch and a yawn.
“I need energy and sugar. Will you buy me cotton candy?”
It wasn't as simple as turning back the clock, no matter how many times someone suggested a variation on just that task. Time unwound couldn't simply be spooled back up again and those five years spent would remain spent, along with all the lessons they'd taught and all the decisions made therein.
Those in the ether wouldn't have felt those five years pass, just as there was no way to wind that time up again, there was no way to unwind time at all in that world between worlds. There were also bound to be some logistical hurdles and complications along the way, but in the end it didn't matter. All that mattered was that those who had been lost in the snap would be returned, and as the world had healed from their loss, it could heal again from their return.
Somehow, Wanda had gotten herself tangled up with Strange and the Mystics -Masters Of The Mystic Arts was simply too much of a mouthful to use every single time, plus, it made Wong scowl at her, and also at Strange for chuckling at it whenever she said it- in bringing people home. Strange and the Mystics could open portal to draw people back from the ether, and Wanda could essentially play five-year historian for groups of them at a time, catching them up on what had happened in a matter of minutes in real-time, but a couple of hours of reality warp distortion.
It was exhausting, though, and only used for people who truly couldn't wrap their minds around it, which was still fair few of the returnees. It was difficult work, and more than one joke had been made about the metaphysical DMV, but at the end of every day, no matter where they'd been bringing people in physically, Strange returned her to the Barton homestead, and sometimes -like that evening- well and away from the front door, but it was nice enough out and she didn't mind the walk, just trudging her way up the gravel drive to the house.
Dying was meant to be it. The end. And as a general rule, it was. Except when it wasn’t. And it’s always a very jarring situation on the revival end of things. Especially when it meant remembering dying. That shouldn’t happen. It couldn’t. Can’t.
But here he is anyway, despite it all.
He’s sat on the front porch of some out of the way house he doesn’t know or recognize. The place that the wizard had decided he should be. Wait here, he had said, your sister will be here.
So far, that seems not to have been true. Pietro has looked through every inch of the house at least two dozen times. No sign of her anywhere inside it, though there is no denying there are traces of her in the house.
Wanda’s things are still not actually Wanda, and his impatience grows the longer the wait stretches on.
Until—
There, in the distance, someone is coming. Pietro watches the easy, non-hurried steps and aches to go meet her. But it would be better to let her find him, so he tamps the urge down and waits for her to reach the front steps, where he’s been perched for awhile now.
For the last few yards she'd been trying to sort out the sense of familiarity she'd been feeling against the back of her mind, and had, ultimately, decided that she was just tired and it was the sense of familiarity that being on the property always brought. It was the first place that had actually almost felt like home, and even though she was the only one there at the moment -they still hadn't managed to bring the Bartons back through from the Between, and Clint was still off doing his vigilante thing- but that voice, that one word was enough to have her freezing in her tracks.
For a moment it felt like gravity had shifted. Like the world had tilted off its axis again the way it had when she'd first felt him die. She had long since stopped poking at that empty space in the back of her mind and the periphery of her senses where he'd always been. A gap that had been like a lost tooth for too long, something that she'd finally learned to live with and work around.
The freeze was only momentary, barely more than a heartbeat before she practically dove forward, dragging him bodily into a hug, face buried against his shoulder in a vain attempt to keep herself from crying and it took a minute to unstick her voice from where it had lodged the back of her throat, "Where have you been?"
His heart is in the wrong place, stuck in his throat as he watches a dozen or three different emotions play across his sister’s face in that agonizingly long moment before she leapt toward him, crushing him in the tightest hug he thinks she could manage.
“You know,” he murmurs softly into her hair, not answering her question any further than that. He still doesn’t understand being here. Standing in front of her. Whole and alive.
He clings to her tightly, pressing his cheek to the top of her head. “It is so good to see you,” he mutters quietly.
She did know, that was maybe the worst part, that she knew this was something she should probably be suspicious of, or at least wary, but she wasn't.
She couldn't be, not when he felt right, like himself, and if there was something out there that could fool her senses -or her mind- that thoroughly then it deserved to take her down, because she definitely didn't have any kind of defense against that.
All she managed was an equally quiet: "Missed you. So much." It was going to take a moment to actually get her equilibrium back and invite him in, reasonably sure he'd forgive her for not doing so immediately.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
🎪 🎠🎟
Date: 2022-07-02 07:59 pm (UTC)Yelena's Red Room training had meant picking up language after language to operate across Europe, a casual familiarity with Russian and English and Sokovian and Finnish and German and others. She couldn't float things with her hands and she couldn't run around the city in the blink of an eye, but she was a former trained child assassin, and yet she had an easy, laissez-faire demeanour despite her brutal upbringing. And all three of them were orphans misled by HYDRA or controlled using technology cribbed from HYDRA: sharper, darker origins than those of the Avengers' group who'd simply been bitten by a spider, or stolen someone's shrinking suit.
So, they'd become friends.
Today, standing outside the local carnival set up on the city outskirts, the short blonde is doing limber stretches in the parking lot as she waits for Pietro to show up. She doesn't have to wait long— timeliness is, of course, one of his strengths.
no subject
Date: 2022-09-08 08:23 pm (UTC)He hasn’t been to a carnival in years. A decade or more now, he supposes. Back when he was young and his parents were still alive. It’s an odd feeling, that sort of reminiscence isn’t something he allows himself often.
Pietro is a blur of motion before pulling himself to a short stop next to Yelena. “Do you always do yoga in parking lots?”
no subject
Date: 2022-09-26 03:46 am (UTC)To illustrate, she swats at his leg. Pietro automatically sidesteps long before her hand even gets close to him, though, and she snorts in amusement before straightening with a long stretch and a yawn.
“I need energy and sugar. Will you buy me cotton candy?”
no subject
Date: 2022-08-03 03:21 am (UTC)Those in the ether wouldn't have felt those five years pass, just as there was no way to wind that time up again, there was no way to unwind time at all in that world between worlds. There were also bound to be some logistical hurdles and complications along the way, but in the end it didn't matter. All that mattered was that those who had been lost in the snap would be returned, and as the world had healed from their loss, it could heal again from their return.
Somehow, Wanda had gotten herself tangled up with Strange and the Mystics -Masters Of The Mystic Arts was simply too much of a mouthful to use every single time, plus, it made Wong scowl at her, and also at Strange for chuckling at it whenever she said it- in bringing people home. Strange and the Mystics could open portal to draw people back from the ether, and Wanda could essentially play five-year historian for groups of them at a time, catching them up on what had happened in a matter of minutes in real-time, but a couple of hours of reality warp distortion.
It was exhausting, though, and only used for people who truly couldn't wrap their minds around it, which was still fair few of the returnees. It was difficult work, and more than one joke had been made about the metaphysical DMV, but at the end of every day, no matter where they'd been bringing people in physically, Strange returned her to the Barton homestead, and sometimes -like that evening- well and away from the front door, but it was nice enough out and she didn't mind the walk, just trudging her way up the gravel drive to the house.
no subject
Date: 2022-09-08 08:35 pm (UTC)But here he is anyway, despite it all.
He’s sat on the front porch of some out of the way house he doesn’t know or recognize. The place that the wizard had decided he should be. Wait here, he had said, your sister will be here.
So far, that seems not to have been true. Pietro has looked through every inch of the house at least two dozen times. No sign of her anywhere inside it, though there is no denying there are traces of her in the house.
Wanda’s things are still not actually Wanda, and his impatience grows the longer the wait stretches on.
Until—
There, in the distance, someone is coming. Pietro watches the easy, non-hurried steps and aches to go meet her. But it would be better to let her find him, so he tamps the urge down and waits for her to reach the front steps, where he’s been perched for awhile now.
“Sestra…”
no subject
Date: 2022-09-10 10:56 pm (UTC)For a moment it felt like gravity had shifted. Like the world had tilted off its axis again the way it had when she'd first felt him die. She had long since stopped poking at that empty space in the back of her mind and the periphery of her senses where he'd always been. A gap that had been like a lost tooth for too long, something that she'd finally learned to live with and work around.
The freeze was only momentary, barely more than a heartbeat before she practically dove forward, dragging him bodily into a hug, face buried against his shoulder in a vain attempt to keep herself from crying and it took a minute to unstick her voice from where it had lodged the back of her throat, "Where have you been?"
no subject
Date: 2022-09-22 11:15 pm (UTC)“You know,” he murmurs softly into her hair, not answering her question any further than that. He still doesn’t understand being here. Standing in front of her. Whole and alive.
He clings to her tightly, pressing his cheek to the top of her head. “It is so good to see you,” he mutters quietly.
no subject
Date: 2022-09-25 01:47 am (UTC)She couldn't be, not when he felt right, like himself, and if there was something out there that could fool her senses -or her mind- that thoroughly then it deserved to take her down, because she definitely didn't have any kind of defense against that.
All she managed was an equally quiet: "Missed you. So much." It was going to take a moment to actually get her equilibrium back and invite him in, reasonably sure he'd forgive her for not doing so immediately.