The Ghost [Marvel | Steve Rogers]

Chapter 54

Novi Grad, Sokovia

Spring 2015

She might as well be dead. She couldn't feel, she couldn't think, she could barely breathe. She was the walking dead.

She was as good as dead.

She simply couldn't be alive anymore.

Her heart had been ripped out just as surely as though the organ itself had been violently torn from her chest, leaving a bleeding, gaping hole. How did anyone survive that? She was empty, hollow. There was nothing left.

No. That wasn't entirely true.

There was a deep, low throb of grief lodged like shards of red-hot iron deep in her gut, echoing the way her heart used to beat. But even that she could barely feel.

She still had a modicum of purpose, though. A shred of focus left to her. There was one thing she had left to do. As she collapsed in on herself, the physical manifestation of her overwhelming pain and grief and rage waning having burst free in a devastating wave—shredding everything in its path, every sentry, every soulless extension of that god-forsaken robot—her eyes had lifted to the sky. The pure, pale blue sky. A little part of her had even supposed that she could nearly, nearly see the brightest stars beginning to show through the blue.

It was a pretty, utterly disconnected thought.

She had seen him falling. The robot they had so mistakenly placed their faith and trust in. The robot who promised them vengeance but had instead only presented them with damnation. The robot who thought fixing—cleansing the world meant destroying everything.

The robot who had just slaughtered her other half. The robot who had just murdered her heart.

He had killed Pietro.

She had felt it. She felt his fear and desperation.

She had felt the searing pain as the bullets tore through his body.

Then she'd felt nothing.

A great, gaping, blank hole where his vibrant, bold, stubborn mind should have been.

It matched the hollow, aching hole that had been torn into her own chest.

When they were children—eight or nine; their parents had still been alive—she had fallen down the stairs of her building, breaking her wrist. It had hurt more than she could've ever imagined. It had been agony. Pietro had been distraught. She'd even heard their mom telling their father that he'd tried to make himself fall the next day, so that he would break his wrist too. Their mother had thought it had been for attention. She had known better. It had been so she wouldn't be going through the pain alone.

He'd barely left her side the entire time she'd been hurt, part of him guilt-ridden that he was unhurt, part of him not understanding why he didn't feel it too—they'd been so close until then that they might as well have been the same person. He had believed he should have been in pain too, just as she was. She had believed it too, but his presence had helped, his presence soothing the pain, sharing it even if he couldn't feel it directly.

But this?

The pain of that small fracture paled in comparison. It seemed so minor, so insignificant now.

Especially since Pietro wasn't there to even try and share her pain...because this time he was her pain.

He was gone.

Her twin was gone. She had nothing left.

Wanda looked up to where she'd watched Ultron—inconsolable and all but mad with grief as she had been—as he was thrown down from the sky.