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“I looked in your head, and saw annihilation,” Wanda snarls.
“Look again,” he replies, calm as ever.
Those two words hit her like a physical blow, and she has to make a conscious effort to not gasp.
He couldn’t have just said that. There was no way he just said that.
She has to stop herself from touching her wrist, from running her fingers over the place where those words are written. They’re hidden by her leather bracelet now, but she knows them by heart. Look again. Written in perfectly even red cursive. She always liked that they were written in her favorite color.
She remembers being a scared little girl, hiding with her brother, shivering in the cold, and touching those words over and over again for comfort. She'd imagined him as a prince, a knight in shining armor, someone who would swoop in and save her and Pietro. As she’d grown older, she’d imagined him differently. Not as a prince or a knight, because there were no heroes like that who could save her from the hell she was living. But maybe a runaway like her, an activist she’d met at a riot. Someone who’d hold her hand tightly while they ran from the cops.
But no, of course her soulmate was a robot. She’d gotten her knight, but she’d never thought his armor would be part of his skin.
But she keeps her face emotionless. This is not the time for thoughts like that.
Instead she reaches out her mind toward his, lets his emotions wash over her own. She sees flashes of images - of beautiful landscapes and landmarks, marvels of nature and human ingenuity. She feels his excitement at being alive, his curiosity about the world around him, his sense of honor and duty.
And… And a strange feeling of hope.
He wants to change the world. He wants to fix everything. He wants to save humanity. And he genuinely believes he can. No war. No destruction. No fire and blood and death. When she looks into his mind, she sees only hope.
Hope, coupled with an image of her as her angry words echo through his mind.
“I looked in your head, and saw annihilation.”
Over and over and over. In just the same way that his are echoing in her mind.
“Look again. Look again. Look again. Look again. Look again.”
She can’t see his tattoo - maybe it’s not even a tattoo, she thinks, considering he’s not exactly flesh and blood - and can’t confirm her suspicions, but there’s a strange sense of affection attached to his thoughts about her. A feeling akin to…
But she pushes that thought out of her mind.
All that can wait. Until later. Until after the battle. Until the end of the world.
An android, she laughs to herself, My soulmate’s an android. At least he’s a hot android… How the hell am I living a life where that sentence makes sense?
He looks across the room at her, and she stares back at him. There’s no time to ask, to put the silent question into words. But she’s already fascinated by him, already wants to know more. What would her name sound like if he said it? What would his eyes look like… up close… when he’s smiling? What would it feel like to kiss him, to be held by him?
She tries to concentrate on the task at hand, on what Hawkeye’s saying, on what everyone’s saying. But her thoughts keep wandering back to him.
Maybe he can sense her apprehension, her inability to focus, because he sends her an answer to a question she hadn’t asked. He projects an image toward her, an image of his bare, muscular back. Those words, her words - I looked in your head, and saw annihilation. - are written in black ink across his red skin.
They’re in her handwriting.
The image is overlaid with a sense of - she can only describe it one way - a sense of, “yes.”
She sees a faint smile on his face from across the room. And she finds herself smiling in return, as she finally lets herself touch her wrist.