The twins lay in the rubble, arms around each other, for two days until they were finally found.

The building lay in pieces around them, the floor they huddled on barely supported by the spindly rafters remaining below.

"Over here!" An unfamiliar man yelled as he saw them through the hole in the wall. Assisted by the heaping rubble on the streets, he climbed up the first-floor wall and through the newly-blown window. He crouched down and began to pull Wanda free, and she saw a birthmark under his left eye that she would always remember. Several more men came over and helped to free the young Maximoff twins, carrying them to safety on the charred street below.

"P-papa...? Mama?" Wanda croaked. 

"Where are they?" Pietro asked. 

No one responded. The men stood in somber silence. 

"They haven't been found yet," said the man who ran the fruit and vegetable stand a block away. "We don't know if they survived. I'm sorry."

Pietro looked instinctively at his little sister, twelve minutes younger than him, and twelve times as fragile. Even if he teased her occasionally, he loved her and protected her at all costs. Wanda's gaze stayed downward, taking in the pebbles of rubble. She was frightened, and horrified, and sad. But she didn't cry. She wanted to; she wanted to curl up in her bed while her mother and father soothed her with their gentle voices and strong hands, but she didn't, because she was strong. She remained standing, her eyes dry, her inside hollow from hunger and numb with confusion.

"We'll find them." Another man said. And they did find them, their bodies battered and bloodied and their eyes glazed over, skin freezing to the touch. After they'd gone down into the hole, the floors above had crashed down on them. It was a miracle that Wanda and Pietro had survived, but somehow nothing had touched them. 

The men hid the bodies, taking them swiftly to be buried properly to protect the children. Admittedly, all of these men had a familiarity with the twins, just as many others on the block were companions, sharing in their quest for survival in the worst part of a worse city. If it was true before, the phrase "it takes a village to raise a chile" would become more and more the philosophy towards Wanda and Pietro.

One of the men, who had been Django's employer, beckoned the children from their designated safehouse below the awning of the fruit stand, where they clung to a cohort of other orphaned children who had been abandoned as their parents failingly helped other parents, the spirit of the community ultimately causing its demise. The man knelt with a hand on each of the twins' shuddering shoulders. Their parents were gone and they would stay the night with one of the nearby surviving families and go to the Novi Grad Orphanage in the morning.

Wanda did cry this time, breath hitched and shoulders shuddering, and so did Pietro, though no one could tell.