Yelena did not, in fact, come back to Natasha’s apartment that night. I spent several hours sitting in the dark, phone in hand, growing increasingly annoyed that she wasn’t walking into my carefully-constructed Nick Fury scenario. Eventually, I fell asleep on the couch. That’s why I was at the Avengers compound bright and early the next morning—though I suppose ‘bright’ was the wrong word to use, since it was still dark out.
Pietro wasn’t in his room when I arrived, either. I very carefully didn’t think too hard about that. Instead, I boiled the kettle, made a cup of tea, and picked a couch in the common area with clear sightlines of both the top of the stairs and the corridor leading to the living quarters. After getting comfortable, I took out my phone and settled in to wait.
Several hours of reading stuff about myself on the internet last night and this morning had been… eye-opening. Nat had been right when she’d said that our relationship becoming public knowledge had caused more than a few meltdowns. There were the usual suspects—angry at me because I’d made their sexy superhero fantasy woman gay—but also more than I’d have guessed who were mostly annoyed that I’d ‘ruined’ their very popular Steve/Nat ship. There were plenty of people who were happy and supportive about it, too, but some of them were a little too enthusiastic about it and wrapped right around to being just as weird and creepy as the haters.
There was also a lot of smut.
I’d never actually been a big smut reader in any version of my life, but it did hit different when you knew it was being written about you, specifically, and the people you knew in real life. I’d found a 200,000-word Omegaverse fic by someone called ALPHAWIDOW87 with the entire Avengers in a weird BDSM pack structure. I hadn’t been too stressed about getting through the Steve and Tony mpreg parts, but did have to stop reading eventually because the last few chapters had been about Pietro and I joining the Avengers, disrupting the established structure, and it got super weird.
I took a break from reading to stare resentfully at my empty mug, heavily regretting my second cup of tea as I winced and shifted in my seat, trying not to aggravate my extremely full bladder. Even more annoyingly, I kind of wanted a third cup, which would only exacerbate the problem. Knowing my luck, the instant I left to take care of business, Pietro would show up and bypass me. Was there some magical solution I could discover to solve the problem of needing to use the bathroom at inconvenient times?
A portal seemed extremely unreliable and potentially very messy. Maybe whatever method Loki had used to dry himself off had other potential use cases? If you could make liquid on the outside of you vanish, could you also use it to make liquid inside you disappear, too? Or was that a quick shortcut to accidentally removing all of my own blood? Of course, it hardly mattered until I worked out how he’d done that in the first place, but it was nice to dream of a future where using the bathroom was a thing of the past.
The first Avenger up, at six on the dot, was Steve. He was dressed in a grey, tight-fitting t-shirt and joggers, and did a little bit of a double-take as he saw me. “Hey! Morning. What’re you doing here? Sun’s not even up yet.”
“Morning!” I stood up, a look of relief on my face. “Actually, can you hold that thought and do me a favour?”
“What kind of favour?” As Steve spoke, Bucky emerged from the corridor behind him, also dressed in joggers and a light t-shirt, though his were black.
“This is really important,” I said, shifting from one foot to the other, looking at the two of them. “Can I rely on you guys? It won’t take too long, I promise.”
Bucky’s forehead creased. “What are we doing?”
“I need you to stay here and watch for Pietro. If he comes in, you need to keep him here ‘til I get back. Can you do that?”
The two super soldiers exchanged a confused look. “Sure… I guess,” Steve said, frowning. “Why?”
“‘Cause I really need to pee!” I said, turning and hurrying toward the bathroom. “I’m serious. Keep him here. Even if you need to physically restrain him.”
“But why?” Bucky called after me, but I was already gone.
One extremely rushed bathroom break later, I returned to the common room to find that Sam had joined Steve and Bucky around the breakfast bar. “No Pietro?”
“No Pietro,” Steve confirmed. “Are you going to tell us what this is about?”
“…Secret brother-sister business.”
He exchanged a look with Bucky and Sam, then shook his head. “Alright. Well, we’re going for a run,” he said. “We’ll catch you later.”
The three of them headed toward the stairs as a group. A thought struck me and I called after them, “Hey, Sam!”
He paused, glancing back at me.
I kept a perfectly straight face, lifting my chin slightly. “On your left.”
Sam snorted, shaking his head, then hurried after the other two men, taking the steps two at a time. After they left, I made yet another cup of tea—and damn the consequences—before resuming my previous position on the couch.
Shuri was the next to emerge from the living quarters, maybe half an hour later. I looked up, our eyes met, and she glared at me for a second before turning and pointedly ignoring me. Neither of us said anything. I looked back down at my phone and tried not to sigh too loudly—maybe I’d made a mistake, yesterday, when I’d pushed her into participating in the spar. I did want things to become civil between us, but I was worried that if I tried to push Shuri into interacting with me too much she’d snap. She retrieved a banana from a fruit bowl that was tucked away on the far corner of the counter, then left via the stairs.
Natasha was next—she’d stayed at the compound last night, working late and intending on getting an early start. A brief moment of surprise flitted across her face as she saw me, but it was immediately replaced by a smug grin. “Hey,” she said, coming over and leaning down to give me a kiss on the forehead before heading over to the coffee machine. “I’m going to guess Yelena didn’t come home last night?”
“I’ve been waiting for so long. What if I just opened a portal to Pietro?”
My girlfriend snorted. “I really wouldn’t recommend it. Seems risky.”
“But Nat…” I whined.
“I really don’t see the issue here.”
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“There’s no issue, I just… I don’t know.”
Natasha paused as she finished stirring her mug, looking over at me consideringly as something occurred to her. “Which one of them are you more worried about?” she asked softly.
“…Yelena’s only been away from the Red Room for a few months. She’s, I mean, she’s like you, right? She’s never really been with anyone before. And Pietro… I love him very much, but he’s so flirty with girls all the time and I don’t know if he’s actually thought things through or—”
“So he’s like you,” Natasha interrupted, gently but firmly. “Yelena’s like me and Pietro’s like you.”
“…I guess,” I huffed. Damn it—she’d just caught me in a rhetorical trap of my own making. Nat walked back over to the couch, sitting next to me and taking a sip of her coffee before giving me a look. I hesitated a moment, then shook my head. “I just don’t want either of them to do something dumb and get hurt.”
“Neither do I,” Nat said. “But everything you said about Yelena? Pietro knows all of that. He’s not an idiot. And Yelena’s not a child, either. We’ve got to let them make their own choices. And mistakes, if it comes to that.”
“Hate you,” I grumbled, then let myself fall over, my head landing in her lap. I adjusted my position, snuggling into her.
“Love you, too.” I could hear the grin in her voice as her free hand came down to stroke my hair.
We stayed like that for a few minutes, her thighs a comfortable pillow. Too comfortable, I realised, as I caught myself starting to drift off. Careful not to make her spill her coffee, I pulled myself back up into a sitting position and fought off a yawn.
“Did you get any sleep?” she asked.
“A couple hours. I’m fine,” I said. “Super soldier, remember? I can go days without sleep. Probably.” My words were undercut slightly by yet another yawn.
“I’ve got a few things I need to take care of this morning, but I should be free after eleven-ish,” Nat said, finishing her drink and standing up. “All yours for the rest of the day, if you want me.”
I grinned. “Awesome.”
She bent down to give me another little kiss before heading over and putting her mug in the dishwasher. “I’ll text you and let you know when I’m done.” With that, she headed off as well.
Another half hour or so later, Peter emerged, shuffling his feet a little bit as he stepped out of the corridor and looked around, bleary-eyed.
“Hey, Peter!” I greeted him with a small wave.
“Morning.” He yawned halfway through the word, still looking half-asleep. Walking over to the kitchen, he paused next to the counter for a moment and rubbed at his eyes.
I grinned and went back to what I was doing, letting him have a chance to wake himself up. While I read, Peter helped himself to a bowl of cereal, sat at the breakfast bar for a little while to mechanically devour it, then got back up to put his dirtied bowl and spoon in the dishwasher. Once he was done, he stretched and ambled over toward me.
“Are you going to be with us for training again today?” he asked, a hopeful note in his voice.
I grinned at him but shook my head. “I don’t think Steve will want another big spar like that today. You’ve still got a lot of work you need to do to get the basics down.”
“I guess.” He yawned again.
I gave him a little wink. “Have fun being a nerd with Shuri this morning.”
“Uh, yeah,” he said awkwardly, a little redness creeping into his cheeks. He turned away, as though he were about to head toward the stairs. I was about to go back to reading my phone when I noticed him hesitating. After a second, he turned back to me. “Um, Wanda?”
“Yeah?”
He screwed up his face, like he wasn’t sure exactly how to phrase his question. “What happened with you and Shuri? Why does she—?”
“Hate me?” I supplied, my tone mild.
He frowned. “I wasn’t going to say ‘hate’.”
“You haven’t asked her?”
“No, uh, I didn’t want to make her angry.”
“Probably a good call.” I paused, trying to work out what I should tell him. Wakanda’s status as the most advanced nation on Earth was still basically a secret—they hadn’t come out to the world just yet and I didn’t think that the Avengers would have told him about it—plus I didn’t think Shuri would appreciate me making the decision to randomly tell him if she hadn’t already. “Has she told you much about where she’s from?”
“Wakanda? Uh, no. I mean, I can point to it on a map and I know she’s the king’s daughter. That’s about it.”
“I don’t want to overstep—there’s stuff you should hear from her or the team, officially, rather than me—but I made some mistakes. Bad ones. Wakanda… I was trying to help, but I badly misjudged some things.”
“Things like what?”
I shook my head. He didn’t need details. “They got angry with me; I got angry right back. We fought a little. Then we had to work together to beat a bigger threat—related to what happened in San Francisco. Her brother and father… well, they didn’t forgive me, as such, but they agreed to set things aside for now, even if they’re still not very happy with me. Shuri hasn’t gotten past it.”
“You said you were trying to help them, though? It was all a misunderstanding?” he asked, confused. “And you’re all on the same side now, aren’t you? Why isn’t she…?”
I made a face. “It’s complicated, Peter. Really complicated, and there are still some residual issues. I don’t want you to come away from this conversation thinking Shuri’s in the wrong, here. If you really want to know more, it’d be better to talk to her.”
“…Okay,” he said, concern still evident in his tone.
“Anyway, go on.” I made a ‘shoo’ing motion with my hand. “Don’t keep the princess waiting.”
“Alright.” Peter shot me another slightly-embarrassed smile, dipping his head. “I’ll see you later, then.” He headed out, leaving me once again to wait by myself and wonder if Pietro was ever going to actually show up.
Thankfully, I wasn’t waiting much longer. I heard Pietro before I saw him, looking up from my phone as footsteps came up the stairs to the common room. My brother, on the other hand, didn’t see me until he had just crested the top of the stairs. He froze mid-step, hesitating momentarily as we made eye contact. I simply stared at him, hands folded in my lap, my face carefully neutral.
After a second, he seemed to realise that freezing up like that was suspicious and nonchalantly started walking again. “Hey, Wanda,” he said, then averted his eyes, heading quickly toward the corridor leading to the living quarters.
“Pietro,” I said, a warning in my tone, and he froze again.
He shot a mournful look at the corridor ahead of him, then sighed and turned to me, forcing a smile onto his face. “Good morning! What are you doing here?”
“Do I need a reason to visit my brother?” I asked placidly, rising to my feet.
Pietro took a few reluctant steps toward me. “…Yes?”
I cocked my head to the side, watching his reaction carefully. “Have fun last night?”
“Yes,” he said, suddenly much more interested in studying the floor than meeting my eyes.
“What did you do?”
“…So, I know you probably think we should talk about this, but I have an idea that is—in many ways—much better than that.” When I didn’t respond, he carefully looked up at me. “We could… not?”
I continued to stare at him, not saying anything.
“Yes, I was out with Yelena,” he admitted, shifting uncomfortably under the intensity of my gaze. “It was fun. We had fun. She… we have lots in common.”
“Oh?” I said. “Like what?”
His jaw worked silently for a moment, then his expression became mulish and he shot me a challenging look. “We both have to put up with you, for one.” I couldn’t help it—I broke, chuckling at him. The tension in the room faded and Pietro’s shoulders relaxed a little. He shrugged. “Look. She’s funny. She makes me laugh. I like hanging out with her.”
“I get it. Doesn’t hurt that she’s pretty too, right? If Nat hadn’t told me she was off-limits, I—”
Pietro made a disgusted noise in the back of his throat, cutting me off. “I really don’t want to hear about that.”
I nodded, grinning. “Fair enough. I just… I worry about you. Both of you. I know you like to flirt with pretty girls all the time—we’re more alike than you’d like to admit, sometimes. I just wanted to make sure you’ve thought this through. I don’t want you to mess around and one or both of you end up hurt.”
“We’ll be fine,” he said, struggling through a yawn. “Promise.”
“Tired, huh?” I smirked knowingly, shaking my head. “I guess I better let you go get some rest after your big night out, then.” He gave me a slightly-sheepish smile in response, and I reached out to him with a hand. After a moment, he took it and I pulled him into a hug. Giving him a firm squeeze to make sure he was thoroughly trapped, I grinned happily to myself. “Okay, well, now that you’re seeing a girl, as your big sister I guess I had better explain to you where babies really come from…”
He immediately started to struggle, a note of panic in his voice as he protested. “Wanda, no, you cannot keep doing this every single time, I am twenty-six years old, I am twelve minutes older than you—”