Chapter Text
On the first anniversary of the Westview Hex disintegrating, Vision decides that the change he’s waiting for will never arrive. After a full year in this new body, he’s yet to experience that click he’s been hoping for.
It was foolish to think he’d return to himself, Vision muses silently as he makes his bed. That’s another foolish thing: Vision has been going through the motions of a human life. He doesn’t need to sleep. He’s never needed to sleep, but he used to choose to sleep, back when there was someone beside him in bed most nights. Now, he sleeps because he feels that he should try to get as close as he can to his own runaway past.
The missing factor is not actually sleep or food or hobbies or anything else Vision has meticulously fashioned for himself. The missing factor is Wanda Maximoff.
He’s been avoiding that particular reckoning. It’s not that he doesn’t want to see her. No, he wants more than anything to see her, to hold her, to witness her smile. Perhaps, if he’s very lucky, he’d even get to inspire her to laugh.
But Vision has been avoiding her because he doesn’t know what on earth he’d even say to her. The first month after Westview, Vision wandered haplessly around the world, his brain recalibrating and reconfiguring and whatnot. He was certainly not able to maintain social relationships then, bumbling through the days as some sort of feral robot. When the fog parted, some indescribable wall between his body and his self dissipated and, in its place, he found an endless well of longing.
So the circular reasoning began. An apology is in order, surely. But the more the thought repeats itself in his head, the more nervous he becomes. About what, exactly, he’s still not quite sure. Rejection would certainly be better than nothingness, right?
Months passed in a deluge of uncertainty. Vision started no fewer than forty-seven letters, contemplated at least twenty phone calls, and even considered making an unannounced appearance at her cabin in Sokovia. And yet, doubt nagged at him. Does she even want to hear from him? Is he too different? Would the reminder of a man he no longer truly is just cause more pain? Has he hurt her too much?
And, worst of all, Vision worried that he might say something devastating, do something harmful, or make some other grave mistake, severing whatever remains of their connection—only to later realize that he sought her out too early. That if he had only waited longer, if he had only felt that click, he would have been wonderful and wouldn’t have ruined anything.
That’s another thing, too: he can’t feel her. He always used to have some innate sense of where and how Wanda was, but that warm, soothing corner of his mind is empty. He didn’t even know her presence had a shape until he lost it. Such is grief, he supposes. Love with nowhere to go, so it goes everywhere but where it's supposed to. He feels a little stupid, in retrospect, for speaking of grief in such optimistic terms. He had never loved anybody then. Now, he has love that balloons until it hurts.
So Vision does his best to sleep, but he finds himself in and out of memories or dreams or persistent thoughts or something of the sort. He’s not sure what happened after he left Westview on that day. He knows the Hex ended and he knows Wanda flew off alone. He lingered long enough to see that happen. But if he knows himself, he imagines he would’ve had some romantic farewell to bid her. What keeps him awake is the thought that he might have promises left unkept.
It’s been one full year. As he falls asleep, he tries to figure out what he might have promised her.
Vision does not, for all intents and purposes, technically dream. The memories he processes are “dreams” in name only, some mimicry of the human function he once longed for. And, to be fair, he enjoys the feeling of being launched into memories without consciously choosing them, but it’s not dreaming.
And that’s how he knows something is terribly wrong.
Asleep, Vision sees a monster. Its sharp claws make a scraping noise against the wall, and he swears he can feel the vibration in his skull. There is no monster in the known world that looks like this, with opalescent skin and a wicked grin that turns his chest cold.
(Some small voice in his head counters that he is something of an opalescent monster right now. He ignores it, because this seems important.)
When the creature speaks, its frigid breath tickles his ear. It’s closer than it seems. It has to be. Either that, or he’s absolutely losing his sanity.
“Destroyer,” the voice screeches.
The scream that escapes his throat is not his own. It’s the last sound he hears before he’s jolted out of sleep, sitting upright in bed with his heart racing.
Vision doesn’t have a single doubt in his mind who that shriek belongs to. Without the slightest idea why and how the nightmare burrowed into his brain, Vision gets dressed. It’s either a sign or it’s an emergency or perhaps it’s both. Regardless, he’s acting on impulse alone, his logical brain standing far, far away from him as he chases that flash of a link at the fastest speed he can.
Still, he can’t feel her. It should be his first clue, maybe, that he’s misinterpreting the dream, but he’s halfway across Europe by the time the thought even occurs to him. Vision can’t feel her, but he knows where she is. After everything, there is only one place Wanda could possibly be.
He follows the train tracks. He rode that train once, with his hand folded into hers for the entire trip as she excitedly regaled him with stories of her youth, back before everything crumbled. Of course, Vision knew that she never had an idyllic life. Beaming, Wanda told stories about gathering berries to sell, and Vision felt a stirring in his chest. It was the first time he felt that particular pull, but far from the last.
There, on that train, Vision told her he’d like to spend his entire life beside her, if only to watch her smile like that.
Over a kilometer above the iron bars, Vision thinks about the cabin she led him to. It belonged to her grandmother, she told him. Her mom’s mom. She only went there twice, but both times felt like the kind of summer trip that people write novels about—the fun kind of novels, where there’s something beautiful waiting for someone.
Vision lands quietly in the forest and hopes he’s not mistaken. All in all, this is an unhinged plan. He’s going to… what, knock on the door? If it was truly Wanda’s nightmare that he witnessed, she’s likely asleep. She didn’t usually wake up from those dreams. Perhaps she still doesn’t. And then, even if he knocked, would he startle her? And what’s the alternative? Phasing into the cabin and entering her bedroom? That would be catastrophically terrifying for her, he’s pretty sure.
But as he approaches the door, something tugs at him. It doesn’t feel exactly like the mind link, but it feels… magical. A little terrifying, maybe. It’s cold, but it’s beckoning him all the same. Vision knocks gently three times, until the pull gets so intense that he swears it’s an effort to resist. When Wanda doesn’t come to the door, he takes a deep breath and phases inside.
Immediately, he knows she’s there. There are books strewn around the kitchen (half fluffy romance and half old-looking mythology texts), herbs growing in the windowsills (hibiscus and mint, from the looks of it), and a small stack of dirty dishes. Vision swears it smells like her, too. He doesn’t pause to look at her things, though, because he’s following the increasingly intense pull toward the bedroom. Whatever part of him retains the capacity for rational thought is hoping this doesn’t go terribly. Most of him, though, is overwhelmed by a force more intense than gravity, and it leaves no room for uncertainty.
Wanda sleeps illuminated by moonlight on the other side of the wall. Vision peers in silently, lodged halfway in the wall, and recognizes the texture of that magnet. It’s Wanda’s magic. It has to be. The temperature is far colder, the low hum at once a little more frantic and faint, but it undeniably has the same core. It makes sense that the magic would feel different, given that he’s lost the Mind Stone and his body has been reconstructed. From the look of her, maybe she’s different, too. Maybe her magic is different, or maybe he is, or maybe they both are. Regardless, he stands motionless for only a few moments before Wanda thrashes around in her sleep and that same primal terror takes hold of him again.
Vision moves slowly toward the edge of her bed—the left side, she’s still sleeping on the left side, though there’s a vast empty space beside her. She hasn’t migrated to the middle. He takes note. He kneels at the left edge of the bed and softly says her name.
He doesn’t reach out to touch her. Not yet, anyway. He’s hoping that maybe she feels the link, too, and that she’s expecting him, or at the very least knows why he’s here. Still, in the event that she doesn’t… he wedges his hands between his thighs and his calves, squished by the way he’s squatting.
“Wanda,” he repeats. Her brow twitches. “Wanda, darling. Wake up.”
Darling, he thinks to himself. He hasn’t uttered that word in years, and yet it still feels familiar in his mouth.
Wanda’s mouth opens and closes like she’s trying to say something. Her eyes are still making rapid gestures behind her eyelids.
“Talk to me,” he coos. “What are you dreaming about?”
“Vision?”
Hearing his name in her voice, however groggy and cracked, brings his jaw to a tremble. He has a million things he wants to say, a million apologies and declarations of love and little stories and memories and musings to tell her all about. But Wanda sounds hoarse from screaming or crying or silence, and Vision knows it’s not the time. Yet, he hopes. Not the time yet.
“Yes, Wanda.”
“Dead?”
“No,” Vision whispers. “I’m very much alive.”
“Am I?”
Her eyes are still closed, her words small and stretching. Vision remembers her sleep murmuring well enough to know that she’s not awake, but she’s crawling out of wherever her brain was a moment ago.
“You’re alive,” he replies. “We’re both alive.”
Slowly, hesitantly, Wanda reaches her hand to the edge of the bed, her palm facing up. Vision lays his own hand in hers and she smiles. It’s a slight smile, but it’s undeniably a flicker of joy or hope or relief or… something. Vision sits on the floor with his legs crossed and watches her as her breathing evens out.
He does not sleep that night, and yet he feels far more human than he has in a long, long time.