Wanda and Pietro Maximoff were something around nineteen years old when they submitted themselves to the experimentation by Strucker and his HYDRA contingent.

They were about twenty-two years old now.

That's all Clint can really think about as he listens to the howls of the sister as the brother is covered in a white sheet so the rescued children don't start to panic.

Wanda's voice rises and ebbs as she screams, seeming to only grow stronger as time went on. It's awful to listen to, like the dying shrieks of an animal caught in a trap.

Her hand, which had seemed so small when it had tried to tap him on the head not even twenty-four hours earlier, grips his so tightly his fingers have gone numb; he's almost certain he heard a quiet crack! a few minutes ago.

The cuts and bruises that had blossomed during the battle sting terribly. He's so tired he could pass out at any second. He really should call home and inform Laura that he did not just spontaneously combust on a giant flying meteor of death that had nearly destroyed the world.

But he doesn't move a muscle.

He sits there, listening to the tortured cries of a girl he'd become something like attached to far too easily as she leans over the body of a boy he'd considered a little shit from the first second he'd met him.

He sits, and lets her crush his hand into a mangled mess – that's his bow hand, he really does need it in working condition – without a single complaint.

He sits. She cries, and maybe he might cry a bit too, because this cocky bastard just went and saved his life when he'd made it overly clear that he didn't like the archer one bit.

This kid made it possible for him to return home and be there for his wife.

The least he can do is be there for his sister.

A/N: I'm crying. I'll never be able to function properly again. That ending was just so completely fucking unfair, both for Wanda and Pietro. And 'Nathaniel Pietro Barton'- I CAN'T.
~Persephone