Novi Grad, Sokovia
Spring 2015
The lab wasn't as abandoned as he'd thought.
A breath of relief gusted out of Pietro as he caught sight of Nina stretched out on the cot in one of the isolation cells, still restrained despite the thick glass and her unconscious and obviously weakened state. But she was still alive; he could see her chest rising and falling with the same shallow, laboured breaths as earlier.
But as he forcibly moved himself past the thoughts that she had succumbed to the Sceptre's power, another thought hit him.
They would lock her up too, he realized angrily. Strucker had begun the experiments on her that had succeeded on him and his twin. It was still far too early to tell if they had taken—despite Wanda's insistence that they had—but the procedure hadn't killed her yet...so there was a chance that she was now just like him and Wanda: Enhanced.
She hadn't asked for it, hadn't volunteered like they had. She didn't deserve to be locked away and studied because of what Strucker did to her.
Pietro made his decision almost before he'd realized there was a decision to make.
In the space of a heartbeat, he had dashed through the lab to the bank of reinforced glass-walled cells, broken in to free the slight blonde from her restraints and, after carefully picking her up, was whisking her back out of the base and safely away from the Avengers.
Admittedly, she wouldn't exactly be safe—Pietro knew better than to think that; none of them would ever be 'safe' again—but she would be safe from falling into the hands of Tony Stark and the Avengers. And that was something.
In moments he'd reached the old, now abandoned, apartment where he and Wanda had been living before they'd signed up for Strucker's Experiments. It was one of the first places he'd visited during his unsanctioned excursions shortly after he and Wanda had been released from isolation, only to discover the whole building had been abandoned; condemned since they had left for Strucker's base.
Quite soon after, by the look of it.
Not that that had exactly been a surprise... But Pietro had taken it as a good sign, and pegged the old building and the familiar apartment as a safe place to go if he and his twin ever needed it. After all, it never hurt to be prepared. It was something being on their own had taught him and Wanda at an early age. It wasn't much, especially since the already poorly maintained building was even worse off since being abandoned, but it was shelter and it was a place where they could hide. He hadn't even told Wanda about it yet.
Laying Nina out on the sad-looking old couch that had been left behind—not that they'd had much when they'd lived here, but what little there was had been long since scavenged—Pietro straightened, stepping back before he could race off to reunite with his twin. But before he could dart away, he found his gaze drawn back to the girl laying on the couch sitting lonely and almost forlorn in the nearly empty room.
She looked chilled in the still, unheated air of the abandoned apartment. Her cheeks were still flushed and fevered as her body trembled and shivered. As he looked back at her, he found he couldn't leave her just yet.
It was an odd compulsion, but Pietro found himself unwilling to dismiss it. With a gust, he'd collected a blanket—slightly less neglected-looking than the rest of the apartment's sparse furnishings—and had tucked it in around her. It was only then that he was satisfied enough to leave...though part of him was still uneasy about leaving Nina alone at all, especially in her current state. But he needed to retrieve Wanda. He was anxious enough already at having left her alone in Strucker's base with the Avengers closing in. Even knowing as he did that she was more than capable of dealing with anyone who dared to mess with her, he couldn't help it. Knowing she could take care of herself didn't stop him from worrying more the longer they were separated; call it his protective brotherly instincts.
But just as he was turning to race back to the base, a flicker of movement caught his attention. Turning back to Nina, Pietro was startled to see her stirring, wincing with every trembling move, her large eyes blinking blearily as she took in her surroundings before her movements began to grow jerky with panic. Though moving at a pace far more in-line with what a regular person could manage—and far slower than he would have liked—he was still at her side in an instant. Part of him was insisting that moving as fast as he was now capable of just now would only serve to freak her out more, and he was willing to listen to that instinct as he registered the terror and panic in her wide eyes.
"What's going on," she was gasping, still having trouble breathing evenly, not that her panic was helping any. Her movements painfully uncoordinated thanks to the spasming muscles Pietro remembered all too well, Nina struggled to sit up, kicking herself free from the blanket Pietro had wrapped so carefully around her. Her eyes roved the room wildly in her alarm before they latched intently on Pietro as he lowered himself down onto the couch next to her. With careful, measured movements, Pietro was pushing her back down onto the worn cushions...bewilderingly soothing sounds coming from him. It was a strange feeling, this urge to help her, to care for her.
"It's okay, Nina, you're safe." Though her breathing was slowly beginning to even out, it was no less pained as she fixed her set of anxious blue-grey eyes firmly on Pietro as he spoke. The intensity of her panic thankfully began to fade, but the alarm lingered as wariness surfaced to join it. After a tense heartbeat she began leaning away from him, pressing back farther into the couch cushions, her legs curling up against her body almost like a barrier between her and him. Whether it was unconscious or not Pietro wasn't entirely sure, but he let her inch away, backing up himself to give her a little more space even as she distanced herself from him. If it helped her feel more at ease, why not. He needed her to calm down, to agree to stay put so he could return to the base for Wanda without having to worry about her. She just watched him, her whole body beginning to shake again as the tension in her frame eased, though he suspected it had more to do with exhaustion and the trauma her body had endured from the Sceptre rather than fear.
"Where am I...who are you?" she gasped out, speaking a little slower. Pietro shifted a little, not quite certain where to start; his name...where she was...what was going on...what had happened to her... Wanda was much better at things like this; even before gaining her new abilities, she'd always had a far better sense about what to say, how to act around others. She was always the one to do the talking, the one to relate to other people, the one to get them out of trouble...the one to keep them together. But before he could do more than open his mouth to answer, Nina's eyes widened further with recognition and her brow furrowed with confusion and unease.
"You were there," Pietro hesitated at the accusation that threaded through the bewilderment in her tone, "you were in that place! You and—and a girl, you were there when they—when they...what was that place?" Pietro's jaw clenched involuntarily as he realized she was quickly drawing the conclusion that he and Wanda were complicit with what had happened to her. His heart clenched as he remembered that, in a way, they had been. Regret for not stepping in when they'd had the chance to help this girl, to protect her from Strucker once again dropped like a cool, sharp stone in his gut.
"Pietro. And I took you away from there," he said as lightly as he could, shrugging carelessly, "it was a place were, well, where Baron Strucker," he paused at the confused expression that flickered over her pretty features as he mentioned the German scientist. With an impish grin, he imitated the Baron's monocle with his thumb and forefinger, unaccountably pleased at the faint, involuntary giggle that came from the slight blonde as understanding flashed across her face. But as he continued, Pietro couldn't help but sober. "Baron Strucker wanted to see if he could make Enhanced people out of, err, normal people." He hesitated again even as the words left his mouth; that wasn't exactly true either...at least, not with Nina. Strucker's comments before he'd begun the procedure on her had made it perfectly clear that this girl wasn't exactly a normal person to begin with. But from the suddenly bewildered look on her face, Pietro was suspecting she didn't know anything about that...
"Enhanced? What do you mean?" Pietro's brow furrowed slightly as he debated how best to explain before deciding it was simply easier to show her. In the space of a blink, he had dashed into the kitchenette of the apartment to retrieve a cup of water—even having gone so far as to wash the mug he'd located—holding it out to the now stunned girl curled up on the couch next to him. Her jaw had dropped, her eyes going wide as she struggled to process what just happened. Pietro just shot her a sheepish look, holding out the mug a little more insistently. Absently, she reached out to take the mug with shaking fingers, though she made no move to drink it, her large steel-blue eyes still locked on Pietro even as she recovered from her astonishment far quicker than he anticipated.
"My sister and I were the only ones his experiments worked on," he offered, shifting a little self-consciously under her astonished scrutiny, "she was the girl you saw back in the lab before—well, before he started on you." A slightly different, more fearful brand of shock came over her as she realized what he was saying.
"He experimented on—that's what they were doing to me?! I'm going to be like you? Because of that—that spear thing?" Pietro shrugged, uncertainty flickering across his face.
"Maybe. We have to wait, I suppose, to see if it worked."
"What do you mean?"
"What he did worked on us," Pietro answered, "but not on the other volunteers." Her already pale complexion blanched further beneath her fever-flushed cheeks. He purposefully left out the fact that it hadn't only failed to take in the others, but that it had killed them too. She was obviously frightened enough as it was, and understandably so. Telling her that wouldn't help. It was a bit of tact he was actually rather proud of in that moment.
Thankfully, she didn't seem to notice that he'd held something back. She was too distracted trying to wrap her head around what she was hearing. Distracted enough that she didn't even notice as he eased the mug from her loosening fingers lest she drop it.
"Volunteers? You—you volunteered for what he did with that—what he did to me?" Pietro nodded soberly, wincing at the distraught look on her face as she instinctively began to curl in on herself. "So you—you wanted him to use that thing on you? You and your sister?" He couldn't quite meet her gaze with that soft, pained question. He could practically hear the unspoken demand of why she hadn't had that same choice...as well as a simple why they would even want to go through that. Slowly he nodded his answer, fighting not to wince at her sharp, distressed inhale. He wasn't able to help the way he tensed, though. After a moment he looked up at her again. She had wrapped her arms protectively around her knees, hugging them close to her chest as her gaze, now far too bright, got lost looking somewhere deep inside the couch cushion between them. As though realizing he was looking at her again, Nina glanced up, fixing him with an insistent, questioning glance.
"So you were working with him?" Before he even realized he was doing it, Pietro was shaking his head, unable to help the way the anger rising in his chest began to affect the expression on his face. Confusion again flickered in her wary steel-blue eyes, though curiosity began to shadow it as she processed his reaction to her question.
"Not anymore," he ground out, "not after what he did to you." Her pale eyebrows drew together in wary bewilderment.
"So you were, but now you're not because of me? Why?" Pietro shrugged defensively, ignoring the heat suddenly beginning to creep up the back of his neck.
"We volunteered. You didn't." He said it like it was as simple as that. And on some level it was...but it also wasn't.
"That's why you helped me?" Her legs dropped as she straightened, her wariness beginning to fade as her gaze grew thoughtful. "Is that why you took me away that place? From him—from Strucker? Because I didn't volunteer?" Mutely he nodded as his gaze dropped again, another casual shrug shifting his shoulders.
"It wasn't right. And Wanda and I volunteered because, if the experiments worked, we'd be able to stop things that weren't right, get justice for the things done to us. Fix things the things that are wrong in our country, in the world," he muttered out in a rush, suddenly rather self-conscious of his and his twin's motivations for going along with Strucker's experiments. It sounded almost silly when he said it like that. Certainly naïve. A cool touch brushed against his arm, startling his gaze back to meet Nina's. A shy smile tugged at her lips.
"Thank you," she said softly. A crooked grin came to Pietro's lips.
"It felt like the least I could do," he said as nonchalantly as he could, though it still came out far more regretfully than he intended, especially as words kept spilling from his mouth before he could stop them, "especially since we didn't stop him when we realized you didn't—" he snapped his mouth shut as a dull flush threatened to cross his features. He wasn't usually so maudlin. He could almost imagine the wide-eyed expression she was likely watching him with. Clearing his throat pointedly, he leapt up from the couch, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet.
"Will you be okay here? For a few minutes? I need to—um, I need to go get my sister. She's still, um...there..." He glanced hesitantly back at the girl who had inexplicably unsettled him. He'd never been this flustered around girls before. But this one, with her sharp blue-grey eyes and intriguing mix of vulnerability and resilience, was different from most—if not all—of the girls he'd known. There was a steel and a fire to this girl, hiding beneath her pretty face and almost gentle demeanour. He could see it flash in her eyes as she nodded, a faintly reassuring smile coming to her lips again even as her frame seemed to sag under the weight of her exhaustion. Unable to help the way he was suddenly grinning back, he stepped back closer to the couch, grabbing up the blanket from where she'd unconsciously kicked it away and flicking it back over her.
"Get some rest," he said, injecting as much of his usual self-assurance back into his voice, "I'll be back with Wanda before you know it."
And he was off again to collect his sister.
Then they'd figure out what to do next.
A/N: Thanks for reading!
Be sure to vote and comment!