Wanda held herself very still under Buffy's touch on her shoulder, trying to focus on anything besides Pietro. Her thoughts jumped and jittered until she took a few deep breaths, calming herself.
"I'm sorry," she said, carefully. "I am...I haven't talked about this before."
She could sense Buffy's understanding, she caught a few stray thoughts about Buffy's sister, Dawn, and something about telepathy? There was loss there too, that was where the understanding came from. But Wanda didn't try to understand too much, just let the thoughts flow through her, mingle with her own and straighten them out.
She was a little afraid that she liked the sympathy too much. She needed to be strong...she needed to go on with this, finish what she had started.
Very slowly, as if she didn't trust herself with...anything, as if she was trying to learn delicacy but it didn't come easily to her, Wanda leaned a little closer to Buffy, accepting the comfort that was offered.
"Thank you," she said, and cleared her throat again. "I am afraid I am losing him," she said, surprising herself again. She'd thought she wanted to talk about Pietro, but here she was talking about herself. "We were together constantly since our parents died, but now I am becoming someone who... Now I have to become someone who can manage without him. Not...not hiding. Not keeping to myself and my memories... And it is so hard. Because he was--"
She took another breath, and closed her eyes and took her time as Buffy advised. Or she tried. The memories came, the sense of loss, the urgency to communicate, and the sense that Buffy was listening just made it more urgent, as her mind filled to the brim, to overflowing with memories --
A stiff ten year old Pietro holding her hand as they stared up at the rescue neither of them could actually believe was finally coming --
His face in the darkness behind a window, urging Wanda to run from the couple that wanted to take her in, so they would not be separated. She'd been packed and ready.
Standing side by side, protesting what was being done to their country.
Gaining powers together, only their ability to support each other keeping them from the fate of all the others --
"It is not really what he was," Wanda said, words taking on the momentum of her thoughts. She stumbled over them, trying to say everything at once, it seemed like. "Although he was my perfect brother, he was there for me, and we were all we had. And he was funny and calm and so quick when he wanted to be, and he was angry when I was angry and I was sad when he was sad and he cared about what we cared about and we taught each other how to be happy despite everything that happened to us, and he was my perfect brother even when he was stupid. He was so stupid."
Blood blossoming across his chest, so many bullets, that was what Clint Barton had seen and Wanda had felt from afar. And she had felt (she thought, she remembered but the memory was so well worn) a faint thread, a moment before he died when he thought of her and was sorry for leaving her. She'd been so angry with him, so angry with Ultron, so angry with herself for letting it happen, so angry and so lost--
Her eyes flew open, as she suddenly realized that she -- had she been projecting? Her mind had been so full, had Buffy caught any of that? "Oh no," Wanda said, dread filling her as she snapped her mind closed and stared at Buffy with very wide eyes.