Project 43: Healing

These are wrong

Elias wasn't angry. He wasn't plotting a murder. He was deep in his thoughts, trying to think. Just a simple question was enough to freeze him. 'What can I do to make you trust me?' It was so simple, yet Elias couldn't figure it out.

Elias had trusted her brother. Granted it was too late for it, but he trusted the blonde. Pietro had given his life for someone he didn't know or like. He had died to let someone else live, even if that someone wasn't sinless by far.

Wasn't the fact that she had agreed to go with the Avengers a sign that she was willing to do the same? She had seen what it could lead to, being an Avenger. She had felt the pain of dying and Elias knew that. Still, Wanda was there, training to fight so she could be an Avenger and fight with them. Would it be enough if she died for a good cause? Would that be enough to show she had made her decision?

Elias couldn't trust her because she had switched sides too many times and so quickly. She would have surely been ready to die for Hydra at some point, or Ultron for that matter. Wouldn't she? So did it make any difference that she was ready to die for the Avengers? Were the Avenegrs even good? They tried to be. They believed they were, but were they really?

What was the point of not trusting her? She was almost constantly under the supervision of Natasha Romanoff, one of the best fighters and spies in the world. Black Widow was able to trust her, at least enough to be around her. Elias knew that Natasha would always be better at reading people than him. He also knew that the woman was too guilty because of her past to let anything dangerous happen. So would it be enough that Natasha trusted Wanda?

"Nothing," Elias finally answered.

"Because the issue isn't trust," he then added.

It was hard for him to admit even to himself, but it couldn't be a trust issue. Trust was rational, it was something he gave based on statistics. What he was feeling towards Wanda was hurt. He had always blamed someone for other's wrongdoings. He blamed his brother for what his father and Hydra did and now he was blaming all of Hydra on the shoulders of one Sokovian woman who was grieving. Who had always been grieving. She and her brother had joined Hydra after their parents were killed and Elias knew that.

"When I look at you, all I can see is Hydra," Elias explained slowly and calmly, not letting an ounce of emotion fall onto his face. Then without a word, Elias turned around and left, leaving the two women frozen in shock.

"That one's a false alarm," Elias said pointing at one of the dead-end clues Steve and someone called Sam had been following.

"Why?" Steve asked confused looking between his brother and the map he was pointing at.

"It's too close to the Svetlahorsk base," Elias said pointing to another point on the map. Some leads had led Steve to believe Bucky had visited Parichi eight months earlier. To Elias, it was incredibly clear, that no one who had escaped Hydra would go anywhere near a base.

"You were just downhill from a base in Novigrad," Steve pointed out with a smile, remembering the times the two had poked fun at each other as kids. They would bicker for hours, laughing over a game of cards. The brothers never went a day without being moderately mean to each other, never too mean to upset their mother.

Steve was looking for even a hint of a smile on his brother's face but didn't find anything as the younger one blankly stared ahead.

"And your brain is clearly still frozen," Elias sighed, almost too quiet to hear.

"... threw my hammer through a herd of them. The lightning I summoned leveled the whole area but I flew off unharmed. When we got back to the glorious halls of Asgard, we reveled and feasted for a week straight," Thor concluded his story. Elias listened intently trying to figure out whether the man truly was a god or just an insane person with a magical hammer. Thor's story was filled with magic, lighting, women riding winged horses, and brave soldiers, all impossible to believe until Elias remembered the other things sitting around the table eating mushroom risotto.