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The changes are complete when he wakes up in the middle of the night. More a stylistic alteration this time, the objects in the room themselves remain the same, only their colors and designs adjusted in accordance to whatever it is that drives Wanda’s actions. Though Vision has no memory of a world before Westview, something on the back of his mind tells him they are all marks of meaningless time-passage. If he thought she would answer him truthfully, he would ask her why. Why change everything only to keep it all as it is?
The slumbering body that shares the bed doesn’t stir when he slips from under the covers. He checks on the boys first, who he finds peacefully sleeping in their rooms, the two things that teeter Vision’s world to its axis and stop it from spinning away. The interloper from the previous night snores inelegantly on their couch, a nuisance even now, for Vision doesn’t need more sleep, can’t eat the food in the kitchen to distract himself, and isn’t willing to wake Wanda by watching TV in their room. Usually, he would be able to dither a few hours away in the living room, but that isn’t an option anymore.
Their house used to have a study he could retreat into, but it has been taken over by one of the boys. He settles, then, for the back porch. Wanda never put much energy into making it interesting, but there’s a swing set for the twins and a couple of lawn chairs on the grass. Vision settles on one of them, facing away from the house, where he can see as the neighborhood slips into darkness the farther his eyes go. The houses nearest have lights on and signs of life, his augmented hearing picking up on someone making a late-night snack, on a television news program, a song he doesn’t know being played. But the longer he looks, the more aware he becomes of how superficial it all is. A shadow theater in which the shadows move the puppets.
He isn’t sure how long he sits there, mind working on a question that should be simple for a being that is inherently the perfect analytical problem solver. Sometimes he plays along with this reality without meaning to, for the sake of a plot he only recently could perceive. But, being past that, Vision can hear her steps long before they shift from the wood to the soft jaggedness of the grass. When the wind blows right and she’s close enough, he can smell her scent, warm from the bedcovers and sweet from Wanda.
Last night, after the interruption made by the miraculous arrival of Pietro, Vision was so emotionally exhausted it was easy to allow his artificial sleep to take over, abandoning further confrontation to a future version of him that didn’t feel like screaming. However, in the chill of this lonely night, distanced from their earlier argument, Vision discovers he still feels like a chemical, combustive reaction is going on somewhere inside of him.
Wanda curls herself on the wooden lawn chair beside his and he doesn’t have to look to see her with perfect clarity. Doctor Cho gave him an improved peripheral vision, unlike the vague forms humans can perceive on the sidelines, he can see it all with as much clarity as if it were right in front of his face. But Wanda is a flawless image in his mind’s eye regardless, even if he were to look away until his far-reaching sight couldn’t catch her any longer.
“I was worried about you.” Her voice is husky with sleep, softened by her natural tone.
“Just needed some fresh air.” He hates how rage simmers under his words. Vision knows he was unaffected, once. A machine through and through, until Wanda made him human enough to lose control. It’s one of those things he remembers nothing about, but knows happened.
“I missed you.” Her voice softens further.
He knows what she expects from him, and he can’t give her that.
“You should get back to bed.”
“Vision…”
He turns towards her.
“We were interrupted, Wanda. But nothing has changed.” His teeth grind under the clenching of his jaw. She’s taken aback by his words and more so by his tone, green eyes widening in surprise. Her hair has changed again as well, shortened to fall just over her shoulders and straightened into natural-looking waves that are all the more becoming because they feel familiar in a way that her big, curly hair before didn’t.
The things he can’t help but notice stoke the fire within. The chemise she wears isn’t particularly revealing, a simple cotton hanging article, buttoned demurely, falling to mid-thigh. Her long, shapely legs are tucked under her, but she’s sitting sightly sideways, allowing the fabric to hitch up her legs and reveal smooth skin. She stares up at him with a lost expression, undercut by sadness that pulls the corners of her mouth down and strikes him like a physical blow.
Wanda doesn’t need to do anything to make him feel human, except be there. She made him a man, a husband, and a father. Even now, as he wonders in the corners of his mind where he can only hope to be safe from her influence if she isn’t the monster under the bed of all the Westview residents, there’s a part of him that craves the touch of her skin like a biological imperative that should be unknown to him. Vision doesn’t eat, sleeps only if he wishes to, he lacks most of the bodily functions that both guarantee and are a subproduct of survival for humanity.
But he has this, something she created in him, one way or another.
“You don’t believe me.” She states, hurt.
“I don’t know what to believe anymore, Wanda.” He knows it’s much the same conversation they had before. But things stand the same.
“I didn’t do this…” When he looks disbelievingly at her, she tries again. “Or, if-if I did, I don’t know how. I just, I need us to be okay. I need our family to be together.” Her voice rises, an effort to convince him, or maybe herself, of what she says.
“At the cost of everyone else in town?”
She sits up, hands clenching on the arm of the chair, leaning towards him. “We don’t know that! Just because you talked to that one guy and he wasn’t good, doesn’t mean-”
“Don’t even finish that thought! You may be fooling everyone else, but not me, Wanda.” His voice is harsh and loud. He attempts to reign in his temper, if nothing else so that they don’t wake anyone inside the house. “What you are doing is selfish and wrong.”
“Is that what you really think of me?” Her voice is weak.
The barrage of feelings he’s sure he wasn’t built for cracks, overflowing with anger and frustration, disappointment and conflict.
“No, it is not what I think of you! When I think of you, I feel warm and light, I feel this softness that you try so hard to hide and is made all sweeter when you allow it to be seen! I picture you and I see… I see the woman I love. My partner and the mother of my children. I see good and beauty and I can’t, I can’t associate the Wanda I know with what you’ve been doing here. I don’t know who you are anymore.”
Tears glimmer in her eyes, falling like sparkling, translucent drops of unadulterated pain. Vision could crack the earth open with the anguish the sight causes him. And yet, he would have exploded from the force of the words he just said if they had been held within one more moment.
“I’m sorry.” She whispers, brokenly.
“Don’t be sorry. Be good.”
He knows now is the time to walk away and leave her to drown in his words the same way he has been drowning in her made-up reality. But even as he rises to go, she curls up into herself, hiding her face against her knees, shoulders shaking with the force of her sobbing. It shatters his vibranium heart.
It makes him feel worse, somehow, that when he reaches a hand to her she doesn’t hesitate a second to take it, allowing herself to be pulled into his embrace. She cries on his chest and Vision loses sight of who is worse. For she’s still doing this, she’s keeping an entire town under control and hurting countless people and he holds her as tenderly as if she were made of spun glass. He loves her with an intensity that leaves him weak. And he’s afraid that, if it came to it, truly, he wouldn’t make the right choice. She makes him human, and that makes him selfish.
And the first thing he ever remembers wanting in his life, is her.