Pietro Quicksilver

Before Wanda Maximoff was the Scarlet Witch, before her hands glowed red, before she could lift a car with her mind or rewrite a whole town with her grief — Wanda was just one half of a pair.

She had a twin brother. His name was Pietro.

Pietro was born ten minutes before Wanda, in a tall gray apartment building in the small Eastern European country of Sokovia. And from the very first day, he never let her forget that he was the older one.

"Ten minutes more wisdom, little sister," he would say, tapping his wrist.

"Ten minutes more being WRONG, big brother," Wanda would shoot back.

Their mother would laugh and tell them both they were exactly right. That was how the Maximoff house worked. Two twins, one tired mother, one quiet father, one small apartment, and a great deal of love.

When Wanda and Pietro were ten years old, something terrible happened. A war came to Sokovia, and one night a missile struck their apartment building. Their mother and father were gone in an instant. A second missile fell into the rubble next to the twins, its long metal nose buried in the broken floor. It did not go off. It just ticked.

For two whole days and two whole nights, Wanda and Pietro huddled together under the broken concrete, watching that missile tick. Painted along its side in big factory letters was a single name: STARK.

Pietro made a promise to Wanda that night. He whispered it so close to her ear she could feel his breath. He said, "I will never leave you alone in a quiet room again."

Wanda made him promise it twice. She would remember that promise her whole life.

Years passed. Sokovia rebuilt itself slowly. The twins grew up holding a quiet, furious grudge against a country across the sea, and against the man whose name was on the missile that had not gone off. When a HYDRA scientist named Baron Strucker offered them a chance to fight back, they took it.

HYDRA's experiments did terrible things to most of the people in their cells. Only the twins survived. When Pietro woke up, he could run faster than the world could see. To him, when he was running, the whole universe looked like it was standing perfectly still. He could circle the city of Novi Grad in less than a minute. He could outrun a bullet. He could read a whole book in the time it takes you to blink.

But the thing Pietro loved best about his new speed was the silly little jokes he could play on his sister. He would pull her chair out from under her, watch her begin to fall, and then ZIP! He would slide it back under her before she landed. Wanda would scream with laughter and then yell at him. Pietro would just grin.

Wanda once said something very clever about her brother. She said Pietro ran so fast because he could not BEAR to sit still long enough for sad thoughts to catch him. And I think she was right. Sometimes the people who move the fastest are the ones who feel things the most. They run from the quiet because the quiet hurts.

On the day Ultron came — the giant peacekeeping robot who decided to wipe out humans by dropping the city of Novi Grad out of the sky — Pietro Maximoff was no longer fighting against the Avengers. He was fighting with them. He had become an Avenger himself. And he was magnificent.

He raced through the falling streets. He scooped up a little Sokovian boy named Costel and carried him to a rescue boat. He pulled strangers to safety two at a time. He pulled Wanda out of a burning building. He moved so fast through the chaos that he looked like a soft blue streak in the air.

Then came the moment.

Hawkeye — Clint Barton — was out in the open on a bridge, holding the little boy Costel safely in his arms. Ultron's gun appeared above them, locked on, and began to fire. CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK.

Pietro was the only one fast enough to reach them in time. He flew in like a blue arrow and stepped right in front of Clint and the boy. He spread his arms wide. He caught every single bullet, one after another, with his own body.

A mile away, on the other side of the falling city, Wanda Maximoff felt her brother's heartbeat stop. It was as if a string deep inside her snapped. She fell to her knees in the rubble. Her red magic flickered around her hands like a candle in the wind.

Up on the bridge, Pietro looked at Hawkeye with a small, exhausted smile. He had only one breath left.

"You didn't see that coming," he whispered. It was their old joke, his and Clint's. And then Pietro Maximoff, the fastest boy in Sokovia, slid quietly to the ground.

The world stopped for Wanda. The world stopped for everyone who had known him.

Many years later, after the dust of Sokovia had settled and the Avengers had grown older, Clint Barton and his wife Laura had a brand new baby boy. Their fourth child. The first three were named Cooper and Lila and Nathaniel. Do you know what they named the fourth one?

Nathaniel Pietro Barton.

Because some heroes you remember every single day for the rest of your life. Some promises stay kept long after the person who made them is gone. And Pietro Maximoff — the older twin, the fast one, the boy who could not sit still — kept his promise to Wanda the only way he knew how. He gave his life so that a little boy named Costel and a father named Clint could go home.

The Maximoff twins were two halves of one heart. And even today, in every flicker of red light around Wanda Maximoff's fingers, you can still feel the other half humming softly along.