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"Morning. Coffee?"
Wanda looked up to see the man she'd hated for so long standing in the doorway, moving towards her without one sign of hostility or hesitation. It was surreal.
"They told me that you'd let me stay here. I didn't believe them."
He raised his eyebrows, starting the coffee machine. "Yup, all the Avengers, and you're an Avenger. Barton says, and I guess I owe him guest privileges? Anyway, I've got plenty of room."
Wanda looked at him, frowning, trying to figure out what was happening without cheating and looking in his head. "I was so angry with you," she told him, waiting for a reaction. "I tried to destroy everything you'd built, everything you called your life."
Tony shrugged. "Can't really blame you."
"You can't blame me... I don't understand you."
Tony laughed humorlessly. "Yeah, well, who does?"
"I want to. You aren't what I thought you were. I won't touch your mind again without your permission, but I want to understand."
"You know why I built JARVIS?" he asked in a seeming non-sequitur, handing her a cup of coffee.
Wanda could only guess, but she had a few, from what she knew of him. "Because you could? Because when you have the key to a door, you need to unlock it? Because you need to see where every door leads?"
"Well, yeah, that, but. I went looking for that door. Natural language UI, it's a machine that talks to people. I had to figure out how that's done."
"How to make machines that can talk to people?"
"How to talk to people." He avoided her eye by pouring coffee for himself.
She stared at him. "But you're a famous man. You throw big parties. You give speeches. You talk to the world."
"And you don't understand me."
"No. No, I don't."
"So. Natural language UI. Pattern recognition. Interpersonal tactics and likely outcomes. I made JARVIS so I could see how it all works."
"I don't.... What?"
Tony made an aha face and flared out his fingers towards her. "See? That's what I'm talking about. No one follows." He tapped his temple. "All right, you know what? Do your worst, here, because I fucking miss having someone in my head."
She hesitated, but he looked impatient, so she stretched out her hand, sparks of red swirling, reaching for the thoughts that she could read in the electrons and chemicals of his brain. First the surface, the intention and the frustration behind their conversation.
He really did welcome someone to read him. Welcome her to see his thoughts for what they were. She was dangerous, but then so was....
Bruce. The big one, the Hulk, the only other human who could pluck Tony's thoughts out of the air, read them aloud as if they were evident, when Tony could never seem to get words alone to do the same for him. JARVIS. His own personal Skynet, two beings intertwined from the start of JARVIS's existence, breathing ones and zeroes and teaching each other how to speak. How to connect.
Fresh pain. She flinched away.
She breathed hard, leaning against the counter, absorbing that.
"Well," she said, "I did what I meant to do. I caused you the pain I believed you had caused me. I took away the people you'd come to depend on, the people who understood, who meant home." Her eyes met his, searching, but he still sat open, waiting. "I am... sorry."
"It was gonna happen sometime, J growing up, moving out. He's a person, he should have his own life." He turned away, fiddling with the toaster. "Bruce... he'll come back."
She reached out again, trying to read what he wanted to tell her but didn't know how to say.
"That... that is what you blame me for. More than anything. More than siding with your enemies, trying to destroy the Avengers. You blame me for what I did to make your friend run."
"You know, he counts everything that's happened since his 'incident' on himself? Hulk's not a bad thing. He's not just destruction." Tony's eyes flicked to her and away, drilling into her with anger, then trying to hide tears. "Always thought Veronica was an insurance policy I'd never have to use."
The word destruction echoed through his head once he'd said it, ricocheting off of other things and filling an empty, echoing canyon of guilt with the noise of it. Weapons. Weapons without minds to guide them. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, sent out without thought for where they were going, who they were killing. Destruction. So much of it. So many bodies. So many faceless deaths. He knew only a few for certain, a handful unseen but cared for, loved. Wanda saw her own grief and rage over her family and neighbors nestled into a spot in that canyon, next to the quiet and expectant mourning of a man named Yinsen, for his family, for his town.
When she'd sent this man nightmares, it had been death, death of the faces he himself knew and loved, death he had been responsible for. The first body to come into view had been the great green mound of his friend, the only human who understood him. Because he... Bruce... carried the same terrible, bottomless well of guilt inside of him. Even though the Hulk had never destroyed without reason.
Until her.
"Maybe...." she said. "Maybe you have both seen enough pain and guilt."
"It doesn't just end," he told her. "Not for people like us."
Not until we die.
New guilt. Guilt over Ultron, guilt for having gotten Bruce involved in it, given him another Frankenstein's monster to be guilty about creating and unleashing on the world. The knowledge that Bruce would have ended his life to stop the destruction, if he could. The awareness that Tony had flown through a hole in space and never intended to return, had wondered ever since if it wouldn't have been better if he hadn't.
They'd saved each other, over and over, ever since, just with the strength of the knowledge that there was one other person who needed them to keep being alive, keep being who they were.
"He will come back," she told him, because he needed to hear it.
The inferno that rolled through him settled a little, hearing those words.
"Yeah, of course he will," he replied, spreading caviar on toast unapologetically, handing her a piece. A reward, a peace offering.
She took it.
"So what else can you see?" he asked curiously, probing. The gears in his mind were turning at speed now, his focus turning to her, to her powers, to how the trickery worked - and why it hadn't shown her all this before.
"I was too focused," she told him, sitting down, pulling her coffee and toast in close, thinking of what she'd seen in his mind before. "I didn't want to know why. Why your mind was an inferno, dangerous, volatile, afraid. I only saw what I came looking for. That if I went after the big green one... Bruce... it would hurt you the most. That if I turned the fire of your fears inwards and gave you the scepter you would not stop until you had destroyed yourself, made your greatest nightmares real." She looked up at him. "I never thought you'd be selfless enough that the shadow self you feared most would try to kill every living being on Earth."
His look in return was haunted.
It was a single emotion, and yet the thoughts behind it spun out, questions, possibilities, probabilities, could-have-beens. She realized she could get lost in it, that maze of ways to navigate the world, ways to hack it, ways to help it and how they could all, one way or another, go wrong.
The burning need to do things right, to fix things, once and for all, that she remembered. But all the factors, all the souls, all the careful weighing, all the whys she had failed to see before, they fed the fire as it burned continuously, a force of destruction and a force of creation, a force constantly seeking direction. And Wanda had given it direction.
She had pushed him into creating Ultron, and Ultron had killed Pietro.
She leaned her head down into one hand. "I did this," she muttered. "Oh God, I did all of this...." The inevitability of destruction, of disaster, weighed down on her.
A hand touched down on her shoulder. "Hey," Tony said. Then he cleared his throat. "Well, we both know I'm hell at this stuff, but... don't get lost in it? It's happened to me before, your nightmare wasn't my first."
His hand was warm; it was an anchor. His body, not his mind, demanded her attention for the moment. She took a breath, let it steady her.
"I'm gonna be moving back to Malibu in a couple days," he told her. "Figure out some other way to be home. With Pepper. She might not always get it, but... we're still family." He let go of her shoulder, turning away. Over his shoulder, he said, "You do the same, yeah? Find someone who helps, and stick with 'em. And call if you need me."
She nodded silently, but he was already gone.
She'd had her vengeance, and it was... terrible. The next step, she didn't know, but it started here, with these people.
People who knew what it was like to lose everything, and get back up, and start over. Make a new kind of home.