Work Text:
Today, they were exploring minds.
Initially, Steve had been Wanda's coach, training her in the art of fighting and game strategy. But he'd soon realised that for Wanda, training had to be both mental and physical.
Steve could do the physical, but not the mental. So upon Steve's suggestion, Wanda had taken up mind control practice with Vision.
In these sessions, they did not explore Vision's mind; rather they explored hers.
The team had realised early during their missions that most of the problems Wanda faced in controlling her powers stemmed from her own painful past that she'd locked up inside her head. She needed to face those memories head on, embrace them rather than store them in a toxic little box and let them go.
Vision was the only one who could help her with that.
Sessions with him were different..
They always sat in a completely white room, facing each other, legs folded and eyes closed. They didn't need their bodies for this anyway. In these sessions, both Vision and her existed completely in her mind, their current physical bodies watching her memories as third persons, soaking up her past as third persons.
Three months ago, they'd seen and felt her parent's death. It had been torture for her; agony and sheer pain to relive that moment of acute loss and to hold it as hers and to let it go. But after a few days, she'd breathed better, lighter.
They'd gone through a lot of memories in that time span, happy childhood memories with Pietro, the muddled memories of Hydra experimentation, the agony of experiencing Pietro's death. And after it all, she'd felt as if she was going to die from all that she'd felt, all that she'd stopped herself from feeling.
Today, as she sat and felt Vision's presence enter her mind, she wondered which memory he would pick up. This was always a delicate time; her mind became his to peruse and her mind was the only thing ever hers.
Today, as his blue tendrils landed on a memory in the repressed corners of her mind, she stiffened.
No
no
no.
She hardened her defences, not letting him in.
She didn't want him to go there; not because she felt pain, but because she felt the burn of humiliation; all consuming, all powerful humiliation.
As she tried to barrage Vision from her mind, he fought harder and chipped at her walls and eventually, she broke under him.
His attack stemmed from acute focus while her defence stemmed from tumultuous feelings; reason always trumped emotion.
And suddenly she was in a room; the painful pink room with lots of teddy bears and photographs and toys. Not her room; Jeffra's.
Even as a child, Wanda had been different; preferring black, skulls and crossbones over the pinks, barbies and the pastels expected of her age and gender. She had also been shy, preferring to keep to herself; completely different from Pietro who had been renowned for his snark and sarcastic humour.
Pietro had always protected her but he couldn't, even if he tried his best, protect her from everything. At school, when they had been ten, he'd once beat up a guy when he'd called Wanda a 'weirdo' and gotten suspended over it. Kids had stopped calling her that when Pietro was around, but behind his back, they still whispered things and called her names.
She'd never had any friends, and at eleven, she never expected to have them; Pietro was her best friend, and that was all. So she'd been extremely surprised and elated when she'd been invited to a sleepover. She'd never been to a sleepover before and she simply couldn't wait.
She'd jumped all day and when her foster mother of one year (a kind woman), had dropped her off to the sleepover, she couldn't have been more excited.
There had been ten girls, including her. They'd had fun in the beginning, painting nails and drawing and doing each other's hair. But when they'd started watching a movie, she'd been the first one to fall asleep, much earlier than the others. When she'd woken up after an hour, she'd been sleepy and surprised when she'd found all the other girls giggling at her.
And that is what Vision and elder Wanda were seeing, an eleven year old Wanda waking up, disoriented and frowning.
Elder Wanda stood still as a statue. She knew what she was going to see.
As little Wanda sat up completely and turned towards them, Vision saw what they'd been here for. There, written on her forehead with a permanent marker by her friends, was the word weirdo.
Vision felt like he was drowning.
He'd never felt pain like this before.
He wanted to shield Wanda against everything; but this was a memory. This had already happened.
Little Wanda rubbed her hands across her eyes, hesitatingly walked across the room to the mirror and froze, her eyes trained on her forehead.
Tears leaked from the corner of her eyes. She looked at her friends and back to the mirror, her face bewildered and pained and heartbreaking.
"But", little Wanda fiercely scrubbed at her forehead. "I'm n-not", she stuttered and ran to the bathroom, her sobs clear.
Hearing her sobs, Jeffra's mother came running up. She took one look at the situation and rushed the other girls to the other room, who'd stopped giggling now and went to little Wanda.
Vision wrapped an arm around elder Wanda. "Darling", he whispered. He felt powerless.
Tears tracked down Wanda's eyes, staring at her littlest self, as she cried and tried to scrub away the word. "I was just different", she whispered in the present, her voice fractured.
Vision buried his head in her neck, her front to his back, kissed her neck but did not reply.
Suddenly, Wanda felt Vision's arms leave her and she panicked. Her breath hitched, her eyes glassed further and her body shook.
She would break. Without Vision, she would break.
Her eyes flew open. She was back in the compound in the white room, Vision nowhere to be seen.
Her breath fractured. Her mind had already contorted the worst possibility for her: had he left?
No.
She turned and saw Vision gliding in the air towards her direction. She stood, her body still shaking.
Vision came to stand in front of her and with superhuman quickness flicked out a marker.
With deliberate slowness, he wrote on her forehead, and she could feel the word weirdo form on her forehead.
What was he doing?
And the he took the marker and wrote weirdo on his own forehead.
Wanda's breath hitched.
He turned her around to face the mirror on the wall, both of them visible clearly.
"What do you see?", he asked, standing tall in the face of her agony.
She looked at the mirror. She saw herself, tears tracking down her face, her eyes bewildered by the strange emotions slithering in her body. And she saw him, tall, focussed and confident.
"I see", she whispered, her voice hoarse. She cleared her throat.
"You and me. I see you and me", she finished.
"You know what I see?", he asked, their gazes riveted to the mirror.
She shook her head.
"I see two weirdos", he said. A pause.
"And do you know what I feel?", he asked.
She swallowed.
He bent his mouth to her ear.
"I feel incomparably in love. I feel happiness and sadness and hurt and I feel you. I feel you everyday."
Wanda's lips trembled.
"And everyday, as I stand with you, as I stand apart from you, I feel that being a weirdo with you, is the most magnificent, the most brilliant thing in the entire galaxy."