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All minds were beautiful.
This was what Wanda Maximoff eventually learned to understand.
The first mind she got to know was Pietro’s. Everything about him hummed with energy, going too fast, yet she knew him before the scientists were done with her. She could reach out, because this one constant had always been there, and before she truly understood her power, she understood this. The connection. If the experiments did nothing else they had been worth it.
This, she thought, I will never lose.
Sometimes she imagined what her parents minds would have felt like. It was like she had the knowledge buried deep in her, even though this was a sense she had never had in their presence.
“You all right there sister?”
She nodded. “I am simply tired.”
“We could go, you know. With all this new power we could strike out on our own, accomplish our goals without all this… this waiting! They need not run so many tests on you.”
Pietro’s hand gripped hers, and Wanda let herself slip into his comfortable thoughts.
“No. Their intentions are good. They are true believers of what they do.”
All the people she had met after her awakening were different, but shared ideals and beliefs. It calmed her to be with such people.
Then came disruption. Other minds, with other believes invaded the base. This was not what shook her, though. What shook her was the fact that their believes were just as true, just as convinced as any other mind. Even…
No!
She invaded Starks mind, spread herself out through his thoughts searching for… something.
There!
She watched his deepest fear, watched it with him, and could feel understanding finally bloom as he realized what kind of person he was.
And then she let him go.
Ultron had no mind.
It disturbed her every time she looked at him, every time all her physical senses told her There is someone there, and the only sense that truly mattered said No. There is not.
She found Ultron’s mind in the end. It reminded her of Stark.
The glimpse she had caught was beautiful. It had been completely different and new, yet familiar and scary, with jumps in logic that she recognized from the many scientists that had surrounded her for so long, but twisted and incomplete.
“How are we supposed to talk with the Avengers?” she asked Pietro. “It will be like making a deal with the devil.”
“Isn’t that what we have been doing all this time, sister? Hydra, then Ultron.”
She blinked away tears. “Stark will not be reasoned with. But they are not united, others might be more inclined to listen.”
Some listened, some didn’t, and then a god dropped in. Wanda looked at the mountain of a mind which she had manipulated with ease. Straight lines, simple roads. It was just as beautiful as before, and she distrusted it to the core of her own being.
Then a new mind entered, and she offered to check it, to see whether it was like Ultron. But despite her offer she barely grazed the mind, knowing that she could no longer trust herself. She suspected she would find equal beauty in a saint and a mass murderer if she simply looked.
They fought.
The last she saw of Pietro was his back, but she felt him to the very end.
You are a runner, a survivor, you will always escape, you will help others do the same…
Rage, rage against the machine. The mindless, the careless, the one who could not see the beauty in anything but himself.
Her foundation her rock which she was built on who always led who was older bigger protector twelve minutes nothing nothing nothing
Someone lifted her out and away, and she thought of Pietro. But no. The mind was different. She reached out and found…
All minds were beautiful. War and destruction had grace, and Wanda never recoiled from a thought, because they were the essence of true life, no matter what ugliness it contained. But some minds were pure.
Wanda smiled at her Vision of the future.