The cheering was loud enough to carry through walls.
In the streets radiating out from the main square, people were pressed together in the kind of crowd that forms when relief becomes euphoria, arms raised, voices overlapping, the sound bouncing off the damaged facades of buildings that were still standing. It was not the celebration of people who had won something. It was the celebration of people who had survived something, and been handed a reason to believe the surviving was worth it.
One street corner away from the main press of bodies, hidden from the crowd by the angle of a collapsed shop front, Pietro had his sister's hand in both of his.
He was wearing a silver hoodie, the hood pulled up, jeans with road dust worked into the knees. His jaw had three days of stubble on it. Wanda stood beside him, a dark hat pulled low, her hair tucked underneath, her free hand gripping the edge of her sleeve. From a distance they would have looked like any two young people watching the celebration from the edge of the crowd.
Pietro was watching Wanda.
Her eyes had found Tony Stark the moment he rose above the crowd with his faceplate raised, the easy smile of a billionaire doing a public good. The red halo in her pupils was faint, the way a banked fire is faint, but Pietro knew what it meant. He felt the cold sweat forming in his own palm and tried not to tighten his grip.
"I'm fine." Wanda's voice was quiet and controlled. She did not look away from Tony for another moment, then deliberately pulled her gaze back to the crowd in front of her, to the neighbours she had grown up around, faces she knew. The red faded. "Pietro, I'm fine. These are our people. I won't lose control."
She turned her head and showed him a smile that was working harder than it looked.
Pietro let out a breath. He rubbed the back of her head through the hat, a gesture from childhood that he had never stopped doing, feeling her relax slightly under it.
"I shouldn't have brought you," he said. "I just wanted you to see it one more time. We don't know when we'll be back."
The smile went a little sad around the edges.
"Where do we go from here? We still haven't worked out how to actually train any of this." She gestured vaguely with her free hand, a small motion that encompassed the powers neither of them had asked for and both of them were still learning to live inside.
Pietro rubbed his jaw and thought. "Mr. Stefan at the bakery told me something interesting. Latveria, just a few hours west of here, apparently had its own liberation recently. Resistance army, according to the story. Living conditions there have improved, people are moving back. It might be worth stopping there first, at least long enough to earn some money."
Wanda raised an eyebrow.
"After that," he continued, warming to the plan, "we've always talked about New York. If we're looking for teachers, for people who know something about abilities like ours, a city like that is where you'd start." He paused, affecting a thoughtful expression. "The other option, of course, is that I simply carry you on my back and run across the Atlantic. Very efficient. I am, after all, faster than a bullet."
Wanda stared at him.
"I have not," Pietro said, "quite reached the point where I can carry a person across an ocean. Yet. But give me time."
"Pietro." Her voice had shifted into the register that had preceded physical consequences his entire life.
"I was being supportive of your travel needs."
"You called me heavy."
"I implied nothing of the kind. I was discussing hydrodynamic challenges."
Wanda's fist connected with his abdomen, not hard enough to hurt, hard enough to be absolutely clear about her position on the matter. Pietro folded forward slightly, grinning.
"I'm going to make you carry me everywhere," she said flatly. "For the rest of the trip. Every step. On my back. As punishment."
"This is not a punishment, this is what I've been doing since we were eight years old and you refused to walk home in the rain..."
She hit him again. He laughed, quietly, so as not to attract attention, and she laughed too despite herself, the sound muffled behind her hand.
For a moment, standing at a ruined street corner while their neighbours celebrated twenty metres away, they were just a brother and sister.
Then Wanda straightened, pulled her hat down a little further, and looked once more in the direction Tony Stark had been. He was gone now, moved somewhere else in the crowd. The red in her eyes did not return.
"Latveria first," she said. "Then we find a way across."
Pietro nodded. He took her hand properly this time, tucked it into the crook of his elbow, and they walked away from the celebration through the quieter streets behind them.
The vector engines of the Thunderhawk announced its arrival before it cleared the tree line, the deep rhythmic hum rattling loose debris off the parking platform's edge as the transport settled onto its landing struts. The cabin door opened with the slow hydraulic patience of machinery built to last centuries, and the boarding ramp extended.
Nolan came down first in his power armour, helmet tucked under one arm. Tyberos followed, filling the ramp edge to edge, chainaxes secured at his sides. Thor came after, having spent the flight doing what Thor apparently always did when a faster option presented itself: riding in someone else's vehicle to conserve his own energy for things he considered worth spending it on.
Tony and Doom had remained in Sokovia. Tony was currently visible to cameras and crowds and whatever international observers were already triangulating on the situation, performing the role of wealthy philanthropist with enough genuine enthusiasm that the performance was largely indistinguishable from sincerity. Doom was operating in the spaces Tony was not, leading the Astartes guards through the remaining sections of the fortress that needed to be quietly cleared of anything that could not be explained in a press release. Between the two of them, the aftermath was being managed.
The logistics team that came to meet the Thunderhawk was moving efficiently, laden with cleaning equipment, already scanning the armour for contamination and damage assessments. Among them, moving at a pace that suggested she had been waiting for some time and had decided against making that obvious, was Zora.
She looked entirely different from the woman Nolan had last seen in the field. The brown-red braids had been gathered and styled into the clean professional shape of someone who spent her days in offices and boardrooms. A fitted black business suit, gold-rimmed glasses on the bridge of her nose, posture that communicated she had somewhere to be and had chosen to come here instead. If Nolan had not personally watched her fight, he might have taken her for an academic who had wandered into a military logistics zone.
She walked past Tyberos entirely, through three metres of Space Marine Chapter Master, as though he were a piece of large furniture, and stopped in front of Nolan.
"Lord Nolan." The tone was professionally pleasant in the way that professional pleasantness is deployed as a warning. "Even if you treat Doom as a useful piece of equipment, equipment requires maintenance intervals. Surely that is within your technical understanding."
Nolan raised his eyebrows slightly.
"The senior generals of the Defence Army informed me he was back in theatre," she continued. "Not Doom himself. Not a message. The generals, as a courtesy. His video calls in the interim have lasted between two and four minutes before he ended them." She held his gaze without difficulty. "I would like to understand whose schedule is actually being managed here."
Nolan glanced sideways. Tyberos was standing with his arms at his sides, expression entirely unreadable. Thor had taken three quiet steps to the left and was examining something very interesting on the far wall.
He passed his helmet to Tyberos, who accepted it without comment, and turned back to give Thor a look that sent him in the direction of the conference room. Then he and Zora were alone on the platform, barring the logistics team moving with practised unobtrusiveness around the edges.
"Long time, Ms. Zora," he said. "And genuinely, David has been impressed with the governance figures from Latveria. The economic integration is ahead of schedule."
"Lord Nolan." The pleasant tone had not moved. "I am asking about Doom. Only about Doom."
He accepted this redirect without resistance.
"Doom is currently our Director of Technology," he said. "The research programmes he's managing are not small. Combat training runs alongside the technical work. There are not many hours left in a day after both of those are accounted for." He paused, then added: "Raditus says things. Ignore all of them. Nothing it decides counts for anything."
Zora looked at him.
Nolan held the look for three seconds, then let out a short breath. "After the Hydra situation is wrapped up, Doom gets a week. Consider it acknowledgment of what you've done with Latveria."
The expression changed immediately. Not dramatically, not with any loss of composure, but the specific tension around her eyes released, and the smile that replaced it was genuine and warm in a way the professional pleasantness had been carefully designed to not be.
"Thank you, Lord Nolan," she said. "We are all committed to your cause. You have my full support."
She inclined her head slightly, turned, and walked back toward the logistics team with the same brisk certainty she had arrived with.
Nolan watched her go, then retrieved his helmet from Tyberos.
"She walked past you," he said.
"She did," Tyberos agreed.
Nolan put the helmet back on and headed for the conference room.