Chapter Text
The protests, Wanda thinks, are all the same. No matter what they do - no matter how hard they try, how loud they scream, how much they plead, no one will ever listen. The world only listened long enough to send in NATO’s guns and Stark’s weapons. The politicians only listened to money - or those countries that would refuse it.
The people listened only to pleading and begging, the background noise of all their lives. Novi Grad, the dying capital of a dying country, it’s people dying in the streets.
“No more NATO!” they cry. “No more, no more!”
No more bombed buildings. No more innocents dead. No more NATO soldiers offering their patronage for as long as they stay - but they are American and English, Polish and German, Czech and Italian, so proud and so self-superior. So ready to look down on them. Even Estonia, so near and yet so far, is infested with them.
Infested - they do not ask for this. Sokovia has bases here there and everywhere full of people who are not Sokovian, who do not even wish to be. There is a difference, Wanda knows. There is a difference between Aaliyah at the market, wearing a headscarf that is not so different to what Oma once wore, and the NATO soldier with his great grand gun. There is a difference between Austrian Katarina who will let Wanda work shifts around her schooling, offer use of her shower and her washing machine to children she knows survive on the streets of Sokovia, and the Stark-run shelters, the homes supposed to help them.
Supposed to. The twins have seen all of Stark’s help that they need to - a bomb, a flickering light, their father’s leg in the chasm below, twitching.
Mother’s blood on the rubble. Stark no more making weapons - except for himself.
The twins hold their banner, raise their fists and scream their protestations at the world.
School is…
School is pale corridors, rust on the hinges, lockers that never stay shut. School books, bright and shiny-new, but in English and not Sokovian, a Latin alphabet and not the familiar Cyrillic. School is teachers trying as best they can to teach a Sokovian curriculum from an English textbook made by Americans.
The world around them, colonised by world powers, so pleased and proud of themselves that they will never let go.
They learn about the Berlin wall - how long it took Russia and America and all the rest to give it back to the Berliners. To give Germany back to itself. How, even now, the divide persists in subtle and insidious ways - east and west, old and new, consumer and keeper.
Wanda wonders if this is to be Sokovia’s fate, if they speak out too much. She wonders if it is already their fate, infested as they are with soldiers not their own, who march their streets and keep their peace - and never ask what it is Sokovia wants or needs.
An intervention , they called it. Peacekeeping.
Wanda wonders how many other children have been orphaned by peace.
Pietro’s shoulder bumps against hers as they walk down the corridor. They are crammed close in the halls - for so many students it is the closest thing to a safe place they know. It is this or the shelters, this or the few crumbling homes that yet stand upright. This or the churches or the synagogues - but the twins will not go to temple any longer. Not since their parents died, not since the world took from innocents and took and took and took and never thought to give any small thing back no matter how hard they tried.
The twins have claimed each other as their own, each other as their home. They walk down the halls of their crumbling school, let their shoulders brush together in the press of bodies, and are glad that here, in this one place, they do not have to hide the affection that keeps them anchored and sane.
Their fingers brush by each other, squeeze gently before letting go. A deep breath. A straightened shoulder. A taller stance.
They part ways, and head to the next class.
They wonder how much more of their world is going to be taken from them now.
The castle at the edge of the city is inhabited; this they know. They know more, too: that it is filled with SHIELD, founded by the Starks and their friends, powered by American pride, and unknowable funding, and no one truly knows its purpose or it’s intent. They know: it is filled with as many soldiers as the bases, and not one of them Sokovian.
Were it an embassy, they might accept it. Were it base for peace, it would not be such a weight, another straw on the back of a camel already overburdened.
But it is a base of soldiers, hidden on a rise just beyond the brink of the city and they wonder how long it will be before their soldiers fill Sokovia’s streets. How long before another piece of Sokovia is truly taken from itself.
They hide in the church in the centre of town, come sunset. They have ever since they ran from the fourth foster family. Home was home, with parents and love. The orphanage was bleak but bright - full of children who knew the pain of loss just as keenly as they did. The fosters were something else, and the fourth, the two split apart… they fled it, gladly, and the whole system with it.
“To hide in a church,” Pietro had said, half-laughing in sighed amusement.
“We do not believe anymore,” Wanda replied. “Not in anything.”
“Nothing but ourselves.”
Jewish children of a Roma mother hiding in a destroyed Catholic church. Wanda thinks there is something almost amusing in it, if they cared to find it.
Pietro’s hand catches hers as they step through the rusted metal fence, over the fallen rubble of it. The council has said, over and over, that they will bulldoze it or raise it anew, preserve it as part of the city’s heritage or replace it with some grand improvement to mark Sokovia the equal of England or America.
Wanda knows they never will.
Pietro’s fingers are gentle on hers, his skin callused but careful, asking only what she cares to give. Her hand is firm on his, taking gladly the comfort he offers.
“I hate it,” he whispers, setting his bag down in the corner. “I hate all of it.”
Wanda squeezes her brother’s fingers, smiles sadly at him. “We learn,” she says. “Because if we know what it is we fight-”
Her brother nods, dark curls bobbing in the wind. “We have a better chance to win.”
A protest for this and a protest for that. For the soldiers gone, for the streets to be fixed. For the shelters to be Sokovia’s duty to Sokovia’s children, not Stark paying away his guilt or a charity fixing what their government will not. A protest against corruption, against bribery, against NATO, damned NATO, needling it’s way in.
Against this, against that, until all their anger and their fury merges into one.
Pietro follows Wanda to the protests, close on her heels, her ever-present watcher and protector. Wanda finds the protest, finds the blood of it, the burning, beating heart, and raises her fists.
They scream, they wail, they chant. No more.
There is no hush when the man steps out of the crowd, soldiers at his back. White lab coat - pristine against the ruin and rubble of the streets of Novi Grad - sleek soldiers and shiny guns. The crowd only yells louder.
The man smiles, and waits.
“You would see,” he says, voice clear, “Your country made great again. Free of the meddling fingers of other men, other nations.”
A falling quiet goes suddenly dead.
“We offer that,” he says. “We have the means to make you mighty. To give you the strength of Stark’s suits, to give you a shield as strong as Captain America’s.” He lifts his chin, looks down towards the whole crowd fallen silent and hanging on his every word, his whispered promise. “We are SHIELD,” he says. “And we would see all countries equal - and all countries great again.”
There is a worry in this man’s promise, some creeping fear, and Wanda lingers back, even as she is dragged forwards by her hands around Pietro’s arm.
“Wanda,” he says, eyes bright, smile beaming. “They said - what they promise-”
“It’s a lie,” she whispers. “It’s got to be. Why would they offer it to us?”
“I don’t care,” Pietro says, shaking his head. “Think of it! We could finally fight back. Finally have vengeance!”
Her brother’s face is bright and beautiful, eager as it only is when there is a fight, some chance to prove himself, bright only as it is in memories, all the way back to before they were ten, when their family was whole, their home intact. When he is like this - hopeful, joyful - she dares not deny him.
“We would sign up,” she says to the man. “How?”
The man hisses through his teeth when they hand the clipboards back. “We can’t,” he says. “I’m so sorry, but you’re children. We can’t.”
Pietro, tall at her shoulder, doesn’t flinch. “We have not been children since we were ten. Since the bombs killed our parents. If anyone seeks to make this country safe again-”
“I know,” the man says, some earnestness in his tone. “I know. Do you know how many children like you I have seen over the years? How many I wished I could help?” He closes his eyes, sighs, tucks the forms into a folder. “But I can’t. You’re not adults, you have no guardians to permit it in your stead. Maybe in a few years - when you turn eighteen. But we can’t.” He turns as though to leave, one hand running through thinning hair.
“We have no one left,” snarls Pietro. “No one. And you would offer us such hope only to steal it back?”
The man looks at them, Pietro leaning forward, only restrained by his sister’s hand.
“We’ve had no one else since we were ten years old,” Wanda says. “We have been to every protest, to every riot, every skirmish we can to fight for this. We are as adult as any of them.” She jerks her chin in the direction of the others, loading up onto mud-splattered trucks.
“Please,” Pietro says.
The man shakes his head, and walks away.