"Hello Wanda."
"Hello, Alessandra. I've come to dress you."
"Lovely. Why you?"
"I volunteered."
"What's happening?"
"Ultron needs you."
"Why?"
"I don't know. He doesn't tell us everything."
"And yet you still say you're working together?"
"We have the same goals."
"To kill my family."
"Tony Stark— yes. The others are just a bonus." The dress Wanda held out was strapless, perhaps a peace offering or apology for the state of her hands from Ultron. Alex glared at it, then at Wanda, and then back at the dress,
"I'm not wearing that. Let him see me like this, I don't care."
"You need a change of clothes, you smell awful."
"Do you want an apology? In case you haven't noticed, I'm a little busy being used as blackmail to shower."
Wanda examined Alex, looking slightly amused, "I'll bring you some water and a cloth tonight."
"Wow, it's like you're reading my mind to know exactly what my mother used to do when she locked me in a room."
"Please, your mother didn't even wash you, just dumped water on you."
"It worked, I remained clean." Wanda's eyes were serious— more so than her brothers. Alex wondered if the girl had ever laughed or smiled, she just seemed incapable of doing so.
Wanda unzipped the back of the dress to put Alex in it. It was relatively painless and Alex felt lucky that they didn't need to undo the chains on her hands to get it on. Wanda nodded and tried to leave, but Alex quickly called out,
"I don't hate you, Wanda." She turned back to Alex, "I know I should, after all you've done but I was thinking and I can't feel anything but sorry for you."
"What do you mean by that?"
"You're so consumed by this righteous anger that you forgot healing only comes from within. Killing someone does not solve your emptiness, it only makes it more painful."
Now Wanda laughed, but it was more of a sigh, "What do you know about that? You don't remember half your life."
"I remember the loneliness. The waiting by the sea on the bench we used to eat lunch on, just incase she came for me. I remember the first alien I killed. I paused, thinking I couldn't do it. Hoping they would kill me first."
The way Wanda picked at the end of her sleeves, rubbing a hole into her clothes was something Alex used to do, and still did when she was scared, "You don't know what loneliness is."
"I know what love is, and what the absence of love feels like. But Wanda, you are loved, by Pietro. I can love you too, I can help you. It gets easier. You just have to make the first choice to let it."
Wanda was staring into Alex's eyes, her own being a deep maroon colour that matched the gloves she was wearing.
"We were similar ages when our lives fell apart. We were just kids and yet forced to grow up long before we should have. They always say that no child should experience that but then they do nothing to prevent it happening. But I want to stop it, I want to protect people like you and me. Trust in me."
"Why are you saying this? To me, as well. Why not Pietro?"
"Because I know, that you know that I'm telling the truth."
<<>>
Whoever had said 'hell hath no fury like a woman scorned' had never met an angry Pietro Maximoff.
He forced his way into Ultron's office, deliberately walking so he could think it through what he needed to say.
"Pietro," Ultron sounded suprised, "I have some files on Alex that I'd like you to use on her."
"Why the fuck did you do that to her?" It was the first thing he said and he'd already gone off his eloquent plan, "I mean, what was the thought process towards breaking Alessandra's hands?"
Ultron blinked. Pietro hadn't quite got used to a robot doing that yet, "She can't teleport away now. And it's the start of torture— not just invoking traumatic memories of her mother but making her feel utterly defenceless."
"You didn't tell me we'd do that to her!"
"Why do you think she was brought here?"
"I don't know. I wasn't thinking, you...you..."
"Blaming me for problems you've caused hasn't worked out for people in the past, so I suggest you reword what you were trying to say."
"No," damn the plan, "This is your fault, you knew what you were doing when you made me be the one to get Alex. I almost died and you made me run from fucking Italy to New York to get her. I was so angry and tired, you were the one who made me angry, telling me all those things through those stupid earpieces that we can only talk to you through. I can't know if Wanda's alive unless you choose to tell me."
"You knew what we wanted from Alex."
"I didn't know you would break her fucking hands. Her hands! What the fuck can she do now? Will they ever even heal?"
"We don't need them to heal."
"You—" Pietro began stuttering, the words jumbling up in his mind with so much to say but no order to say them in, "Why? Why would you do this?"
"As I said before, it made the most sense," Ultron's eyes narrowed, "And now for a question of my own— why do you care? You hate Stark, she's the daughter of him."
"I want to kill Stark, not maim him. And he's bad, he's evil. Those hundreds of thousands he killed, with not an apology or understanding. Alessandra—"
"And if I told you Alex had killed too? Maybe not as many as Stark, but why are numbers important? A death is a death, is it not? She is everything we hate and we can use her to get what we want, as well as giving her the punishment she deserves."
"I nearly let her go on the plane. I fought off those words of hatred," Pietro spat the word, "you put in me and I looked at her and I thought, can I really do this? And I thought I could because you wouldn't actually hurt her. We would get what we needed and she would go free."
"Then you were a fool. I never promised not to hurt her, and if there was another way I would have taken it."
"There's always another way. You broke her hands." Pietro had held those hands on the plane. He hadn't meant to and when questioned about it, he'd said it was to stop her teleporting away.
It wasn't.
Alessandra had looked like Wanda when she slept; a small frown, twitching head and the fluttering eyelids of a nightmare. He had just wanted to comfort her, and seeing her in that position had made him realise— properly and for the first time, that Alex was just a teenager like him.
"And I'll do worse. This is what you wanted Pietro, this is the world you've chosen."
Alessandra was like him. She didn't deserve this and neither had Pietro, "She did nothing wrong!"
Ultron moved so fast, so unexpectedly that Pietro couldn't even dodge. The solid metal fist on the android collided with his stomach, winding him, before the other came in with a punch to the nose that left Pietro on the floor.
"She is what's wrong with this world. Filthy mutant, dangerous and damaging to anything around her." Ultron's tone suddenly changed and he offered a hand to Pietro, who ignored it in favour of trying to stop the flow of blood to his nose, "You saw what she's done to you and Wanda. Imagine what she could do if someone like me wasn't there to stop her— to stop them. I want to protect this world, it's what I'm here for. Trust in me."
Pietro spat in his face.
Ultron grabbed Pietro by the throat, lifting him up into the air, but when he spoke, his voice was even calmer than before,
"What do you want me to do with Wanda? When you're gone, that is. Will she be good, do you think? Will she do what you failed? Because you always fail, Pietro, you've failed at every attempt to protect her from when you were children to now. I don't want to hurt Wanda, I'm rather fond of her but I can't waste my time looking after her just because you felt pity for a monster." After finishing this, Ultron dropped Pietro on the ground.
He turned away and Pietro thought it was over, when Ultron turned back and stamped his foot down on Pietro's stomach. He managed to roll on his side as bile dribbled out of his mouth, but Ultron only began kicked him again and again. Pietro couldn't even curl in on himself to protect his stomach, but surely Ultron would have just found another to hurt him if he did. Nothing could hurt him as much as th words could— physical wounds healed quicker for Pietro but the reminder of him once again failing his sister.
"Look what you made me do," Ultron tutted and turned his back on him.
"The only monster I felt pity for was you." Pietro spat, but Ultron's words had already worked and his mouth was so full of blood and bile that the words couldn't be heard anyway. As much as he wanted to help Alex, he had a duty to protect Wanda first. She still believed wholeheartedly in Ultron and Pietro couldn't trust her to follow him again away from the Android when he was the one who got them into this mess first.
Ultron turned around and threw the loose files at Pietro. One by one, they fluttered down and landed into spots of Pietro's blood and he watched the white innocence give way to red.
Ultron smiled, "I'll be keeping an eye on you. Remember who you've got to lose."
A/N those of you who read the first release will know this wasn't originally in it! Well, the Wanda scene was written and cut out but the Pietro scene was only written tonight (13.11.2021. At 3am, I think that will explain why I go off here). I knew Pietro confronted Ultron for the longest time but never knew where it fitted, and so many times I tried to add it e.g. the original hotel room scene had Pietro with his shirt off too and Alex noticed bruises but then I was like, no that can't happen because they would have faded already due to super healing. And then Pietro told Alex about it at one point and I was like 'no, because he didn't do it for Alex, he wouldn't want her to know'. Also there is a chance I did write them talking about it and I just forgot where it is. That happened with most of the last ten chapters, I have no idea what's going on in them and I often just move scenes if I love them but don't think they fit. Hence an awarded situation in another books I wrote where they have the same conversation twice and I did not realise...oops...this is also why you may see similar conversations. I don't mean to copy and paste, I'm just super proud of my work and I have a terrible memory. And this is the hard bit too about writing the story— I knew Pietro did this, even if others didn't. So I know Pietro isn't a class-A asshole, even at this point when he was and if I can't have these scenes of him being normal and then getting beaten up and threatened into hating Alex, people just see him being a jerk. Which I don't blame them for but sometimes I wanna scream HE'S A TRAUMATISED TEEN WHOSE DOING HIS BEST AND TRYING TO UNLEARN ALL THE HATRED HE WAS TAUGHT WHILE TRYING TO PROTECT THE ONE PERSON HE HAS LEFT IN LIFE WHO HAS BEEN THREATENED BY ALEX A FEW TIMES. AND ALEX TRIED TO KILL HIM SHE'S NOT PERFECT
I'm joking, I love Alex and she is so different from me and I feel like most people, it's why I love to write her. Like her forgiveness comes from pain and it does come round to bite her in the ass (SPOILER ALERT which you don't know yet but if you read the sequel you definitely will soon. Or not soon, whenever we get to england in the sequel)
It's half three, I haven't slept much in days. Night y'all! Goodness bless autocorrect for making this make sense so I don't have to think. Although I am now thinking a drunk or sleep deprived commentary on Vanished from me would be the funniest and therefore greatest thing ever
Night again! If you've made it this far, thank you :( I really appreciate everything you guys do for this book