CHAPTER 1: AWAKENING IN SHADOWS
The taste of copper and concrete dust coated Pietro's tongue as consciousness dragged him from darkness. His eyes snapped open to the familiar sight of cracked ceiling tiles, water stains spreading across them like old bloodstains. The same cell. The same fluorescent light that buzzed and flickered with mechanical persistence.
But everything was wrong.
"What the hell—"
The thought fractured as two sets of memories crashed together in his skull like colliding trains. One belonged to Pietro Maximoff, twenty-six-year-old Sokovian orphan, volunteer for Hydra's enhancement program. The other...
The other belonged to someone who had watched Pietro Maximoff die.
He bolted upright on the narrow cot, his heart hammering against his ribs. Fragmented images flooded his mind: a silver-haired speedster in blue, bullets tearing through flesh, a child's terrified face, Clint Barton's anguished scream. His own body riddled with holes, blood pooling beneath him on Sokovian rubble.
"No, no, no. That's not—I'm not—"
But the memories were crystal clear. Not Pietro's memories. Someone else's. Someone who had sat in a darkened theater, watching that death scene unfold on a massive screen. Watching his death. Watching Wanda's agonized shriek as her brother's body went still.
A movie. The Sokovian's death had been entertainment.
Pietro's hands trembled as he pressed them against his temples, trying to make sense of the impossible. He remembered growing up in Sokovia, remembered the bomb that killed their parents, remembered volunteering for the experiments. But he also remembered a different life—a life where Sokovia was fiction, where the Avengers were characters, where Pietro Maximoff was a supporting player whose death served a narrative purpose.
"Transmigration," the foreign memories whispered. "Soul displacement. You died, and something put you here. Three days before the Mind Stone experiment."
Three days before his canonical death.
That knowledge hit him like ice water. In seventy-two hours, if events proceeded as they had in the movie, he would volunteer for Strucker's experiment. The Mind Stone would give him speed. Ultron would rise. Sokovia would fly. And Pietro Maximoff would die saving Hawkeye's life.
Unless he changed it.
Wisps of something dark and ethereal curled around his fingers as his emotions spiked—not red like Wanda's chaos magic, but deep purple-black, shot through with veins of electric blue. The energy felt ancient and hungry, like the space between dying stars. It responded to his will, coiling around his hands like living smoke.
"Void energy," the transmigrator memories supplied. "Dimensional power from realities that no longer exist. That's how you got here—through the spaces between collapsed universes."
The void writhed against his skin, cold and electric. Not painful, but alien. Wrong in a way that made his bones ache. This power hadn't existed in the original timeline. This was new, a consequence of his displacement. A side effect of cheating death.
The cell door's electronic lock beeped twice—Wanda's signal that she was coming. Pietro immediately clenched his fists, forcing the void energy to dissipate. Whatever this power was, whatever had brought him here, he couldn't let anyone discover it. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
The heavy door swung open, and his twin sister stepped inside.
Wanda looked exactly as he remembered—as both versions of him remembered. Auburn hair fell in waves around her face, and her dark eyes held that perpetual sadness that had lived there since their parents died. But beneath the melancholy was something else, something that made Pietro's chest tighten with protective fury.
Hope.
She still believed they could make the world better. Still believed Strucker's promises that they could gain the power to protect people like them. In three days, that hope would be tested by contact with an Infinity Stone, and she would survive where so many others had died.
But Pietro's survival was far from guaranteed.
"You look terrible," Wanda said, settling on the edge of his cot. Her Sokovian accent was softer than his, gentler. She'd always been the diplomatic twin.
"Good morning to you too, sestra." Pietro attempted his usual grin, but it felt wooden. Everything felt different with the weight of two lifetimes pressing against his skull.
Wanda's magic reached for him instinctively—not red energy, not yet, but the subtle psychic touch that had always existed between them. Their twin bond, deeper than blood, older than memory. Her power brushed against his mind and recoiled slightly, confusion flickering across her face.
"She senses something wrong," Pietro realized. "But she doesn't know what."
"Bad dreams again?" she asked, though her tone suggested she knew it was more than that.
Pietro seized the half-truth like a lifeline. "Nightmares. Prophetic ones, maybe." He rubbed his face, letting exhaustion show. "I saw flying robots, Wanda. Metal men with red eyes. And there was this figure in gold and red armor, like a knight from the old stories, but made of light and steel."
Her eyebrows drew together. "The Mind Stone experiments begin in three days. Perhaps your mind is... preparing itself. Showing you possibilities."
"If only she knew," Pietro thought grimly. "It's not possibilities. It's certainties. Unless I can change them."
"Maybe," he said aloud. "In the dream, we were fighting alongside them. The metal men, the knight. Like we were... heroes." He let his voice carry the wonder that Wanda would expect, the naive hope that they could still be good people despite volunteering for Hydra's enhancement program.
Wanda's eyes lit up—there was that hope again, shining like a candle in the darkness of their cell. "Perhaps that's what we're meant to become. Perhaps the experiments will give us the power to protect people instead of just—"
"Instead of just killing Stark," Pietro finished. The name tasted bitter in his mouth. According to the transmigrator memories, Tony Stark wasn't the monster they'd believed him to be. He was arrogant, reckless, haunted by his own mistakes—but not evil. The bomb that killed their parents had been manufactured by his company, but sold by people he'd trusted. Stark himself had been betrayed, just as they had been.
But Pietro couldn't tell Wanda that. Not yet. She needed her anger to survive the next three days.
"We should rest," he said instead. "Big day ahead of us tomorrow."
Wanda studied his face for a long moment, and Pietro felt her magic brush against his thoughts again. This time he was ready for it, creating mental barriers the way the transmigrator memories taught him. Not blocking her completely—that would be suspicious—but deflecting her deeper probes.
Finally, she nodded and stood. "Try to sleep, brat. And Pietro?" She paused at the door, looking back at him. "Whatever happens in three days... we face it together. Like always."
The door closed with a metallic clang, leaving Pietro alone with his borrowed memories and stolen time.
He waited five minutes, counting the seconds, before allowing the void energy to emerge again. This time he didn't fight it, letting the purple-black wisps dance between his fingers like tame lightning. The power felt vast and deep, connected to something infinitely larger than himself. Like touching the edge of an ocean made of collapsed stars.
"What are you?" he wondered, watching the energy coil around his wrist like a living bracelet.
The void didn't answer in words, but images flashed through his mind—glimpses of realities that had existed once but existed no longer. Universes where different choices had been made, where heroes became villains, where entire civilizations rose and fell in the span of heartbeats. All of them gone now, reduced to this hungry darkness that clung to his soul.
He was carrying the death of worlds in his cells.
The thought should have terrified him. Instead, it filled him with cold determination. If he was going to survive the next three days, if he was going to save Wanda and prevent his own death, he would need every advantage he could get.
Including this one.
Pietro stood and moved to the center of the cell, away from the walls and the door. Then, drawing on instincts he didn't fully understand, he reached for the void energy and his own natural speed simultaneously.
The combination was electric.
Reality twisted around him for a fraction of a second, and suddenly he was standing against the opposite wall, ten feet from where he'd started. No running, no acceleration—just a single step through folded space that had taken him across the room in an instant.
A shadow step. A brief tear in dimensional space that allowed him to move without actually traveling the distance between two points.
Pietro's grin was savage and genuine this time. "You didn't see that coming," he whispered to the empty room, testing the phrase that would become his trademark.
The void energy pulsed in response, eager and hungry. It wanted to be used. It wanted to consume. But Pietro could feel the danger in that hunger—this power wasn't just a tool, it was alive in its own alien way. If he wasn't careful, it might devour him from the inside out.
Still, it was his now. His secret weapon against a fate that had already killed him once.
Three days until the Mind Stone experiment. Three days to prepare for a survival that history said was impossible.
Pietro Maximoff had died saving Clint Barton's life, but Pietro the transmigrator was going to live. He was going to save everyone—his sister, the Avengers, himself—and he was going to rewrite the story that had made him a footnote in someone else's heroic journey.
The void energy crackled around his hands like approval, and Pietro began to plan.
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