Archive of Our Own

“I call him, ‘The Vision!’”

Professor Stark gestured to the dead-eyed robot with a wide grin that, in another life, could have wooed investors with pockets as deep as the entire student body’s collective debt. But in this life, his audience hardly came with stakes that thick and green. 

In this life, at this moment, all he had was Wanda. 

“...why?” 

The grin fell from his face. “Why? Why? Let me tell you something, Miss--uh…” 

“Maximoff.” 

“Right, right--oh, Maximoff, you’ve turned in some fantastic lab reports, good to put a name with a face. Anyway.” He pointed back towards the robot with the frayed bit of wire he’d stored behind his ear. “This is the future. He’s a prototype for now but artificial intelligence is going to change the way we live. He’s a vision for what’s to come! See? Vision? Makes sense, right?”

And again the pause, the grin with the motive. It wasn’t that the technology wasn’t fascinating--it was, and already a hundred and one questions were popping up in her head about this and that--but she had sacrificed the hour between classes for a reason. She’d thought it was a fairly obvious reason, too, what with her standing in front of him with an armful of blueprint paper she’d nicked from the architecture school. 

“I mean--I guess?” she said. “I actually wanted to ask about something else--” 

“Oh. Wait, do I have office hours right now?” He turned to the bulletin board on the far wall, but what hadn’t been singed by electrical burns was covered with wrinkled take-out menus. “I do, don’t I?” 

He didn’t. 

“Said so on the syllabus,” Wanda said, stepping over to the next lab table over. She unfurled her papers and laid a couple stray drills and screwdrivers at the corners to hold them open. “So Professor Stark, in electrodynamics today--”

“Are those your designs?”

“The starts of them. But today in lecture--”

“They’re good.” Pulling his glasses back down from where they had been perched on his forehead, he squinted at the center diagram before drifting off to the top-left insets. “What were you saying about lecture this morning?”

“Poynting’s theorum,” she said. The notes were in her backpack somewhere, stuffed under a textbook for that Russian class they insisted she take. Too much time to pull them out now. “You said deriving the vector involved Maxwell’s equations, but I missed a few steps that I need for what I’ve been working on.”

His finger was following the flow of the drawings, pausing where the gaps still were, where she’d scrawled notes to herself and scratched them out again in a different colored pen. “Mhm… yeah, I can get you that no problem--what’s your end goal here, though?” Whipped back around and stared curiously--pressing, almost. After a moment, he propped his elbow up on the table, leaning his chin into it.

Wanda offered a brief explanation, a magnetic and electric field manipulator that could be fit into a glove--

“Yeah, yeah, I get that. You’re trying to replicate the Force,” he said. “This department’s full of Star Wars junkies, so you’re not alone by any means--”

“That’s not--”

“But what are you going to do with this when you’re done?”

She stared, certain that her mouth was hanging open a bit. When she was done? What else was there to do when the designs were completed? They would go to the bottom drawer of the dresser in her dorm room along with all the others, and she would pull up the carefully-organized spreadsheet to see which other idea she could tackle.

After all, it wasn’t as if she was going to spend all her time studying.

“I’m not sure I understand the question,” she said.

“Are you going to build it?”

“Build it?” she snorted.

“Because you can, you know. Right here.” He didn’t wait for her to say anything--a smart move, as she was far too stunned. “You’re talented. Get those vectors in there, and Vision and I will see you here next week.”

 The bench outside the physics department was, as far as Wanda could tell, usually empty--likely because the old oak tree providing its shade dumped acorns all over it, something the harried students could hardly be bothered to notice until they sat down on one of their sharp points. But if that was the only downside, she was more than happy to contend with it. She still had a few minutes before she needed to head to the dining hall for dinner.

Plus, her phone had been vibrating all day and there hadn’t been any time to check it.

All Snapchat, and all from Pietro: exaggerated wide eyes over his coffee thermos, the time filter displaying 5:30 AM; a few short videos of him messing with his teammates; and then a final shot of his coach’s timer covered in celebratory emojis. He’d recorded a new personal best in one of his events.

I hope Coach has talked to you about the Olympic trials with a time like that, she sent him over Whatsapp. Proud of you, bro. Sokovia should be too.

He wouldn’t receive it until morning. I’ll call you every day, Wanda, promise--but they hadn’t anticipated just how badly the time zones would interfere. How her class schedule and his training kept their blocks of free time on opposite ends of the day.

Their last Skype call was weeks ago, and the next day he had overslept for practice.

An unsent message sat waiting in the text box of the app, full of kissy-face emojis, but she held the backspace until they were gone.

“Wanda!”

“Oh dear,” she muttered to herself, adding more loudly, “Hi, Steve!”

“Hey!” He wasn’t out of breath from practically running over to where she sat, but the glisten of the early September heat shone prominently across his forehead. “Didn’t forget about Newcomb tonight, right? I hear they’re serving stir fry that’s even better than the stuff at O-hill.”

“Of course I didn’t forget,” she sighed. “It’s not for another twenty minutes.”

“Still gotta walk there, though,” he said. “And as your Big in the Transfer Student Society--”

“I know. It’s your duty.”

So he insisted they walk there together, especially since--as he said-- a couple of his friends had already snagged a table in the super crowded area of the dining hall, and he didn’t want her to not be able to find them. “You’ll like them. I know you will. And they’ve heard their fair share about you, too, so I know they’re going to like you too.”

He was well-intentioned--that much she had figured out--but it didn’t keep the urge to frown at bay. And even if he could sense her sour mood, he didn’t show it; within a few seconds he had managed to pull her to her feet and they were heading up the hill towards the center of campus. His fists had jammed themselves into his jeans pockets, and he was rambling on about something or other, a few experiences he had during his first semester after he had transferred.

“Big prestigious school like this,” he said, “it’s hard. The small fine arts school I came from was--well. I got into the architecture program here and it was like there was some unofficial competition to see who could stay at their workstation the latest. My friend Helen says pre-med’s the same thing, but at least there’s… I don’t know, a better reason for it?”

Wanda had met Helen earlier that week in the physics library when they shared the same table. She had an intro physics textbook open next to a stack of MCAT prep material, and judging by the dark circles under her eyes, she hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in a while. When Wanda had mentioned as much--hesitantly, as she could have been intruding--Helen laughed, suggested that they snag a coffee from the cafe in the chemical engineering building across the street.

It was nice. She was nice, a potential friend. Wanda hadn’t gotten her number, of course, but maybe--

“Is Helen going to be here tonight?” she asked.

“Oh--um,” Steve said. “Wait, that’s right. Her stats class has an exam tonight. Why?”

“No reason,” she said quickly.

The dining hall was already packed when they arrived, the narrow aisles between tables pressed shut with bodies and heavy backpacks. A couple corners were dominated by groups she had already seen around enough to familiarize herself with: the student athletes in their matching bags and windbreakers by the wall; the band kids on their way to practice in the back corner; the future student council president hopefuls in the center of it all, with people they knew stopping by to say hello so often that their food must have gotten cold.

Built like their uncle’s old pick-up truck, Steve was able to effortlessly cut a path through the crowds over to what apparently constituted as his friends’ usual table once they had found a plate of food. And of course he motioned for her to take a seat in the middle between a redhead in a leather jacket and a guy dressed to the nines in a ROTC uniform.

“Everyone, this is Wanda,” he said. “Wanda, everyone.”

“Natasha,” said the redhead.

“Sam,” said ROTC.

Steve nudged himself closer to the end of the table, on the other side of someone she was ready to call Messy Man-Bun who was already whispering close into Steve’s ear.

The blonde sitting across from her snorted into her chicken. “They’re embarrassing,” she said. “Nat, I honestly don’t know how you put up with them.”

“A whole lot of patience,” Natasha said, Sam echoing her in agreement. “That’s Sharon, by the way,” she added to Wanda. “And the asshole about to crawl up Steve’s is Bucky.”

It was a lot to take in--the garble of chatter around them, the cheap metal forks scraping cheaper plastic dishes, new names and people. “So are they... dating?” she asked.

Natasha opened her mouth, but Sam cut across her. “No, no, no, let me have the honors here. If you’re going to be hanging around us, you should know what you’re dealing with--”

“I don’t have to--”

“It’s better this way,” Sharon said. “Trust me.”

Sam rearranged the few remaining fries on his plate into a position that Wanda assumed had been perfected after outlining the circumstances so many times. His fork pointed to the fry in the middle. “Back at Steve’s old school, he had a weird fling with one of the younger professors outside his department. The first weekend he shows up here, though, he has a one-night stand with Sharon over there”--Sharon gave a lazy salute--“and found out the next morning that professor is Sharon’s aunt. Then a few weeks later he runs into Bucky, a childhood best friend he’d lost contact with, who’s dating Natasha already because they knew each other at that awful military boarding school they both went to. But!” Here Sam paused from his fry diagram and held the fork straight in the air. “There had been some unresolved feelings between those two.”

“Now,” Natasha said, twirling a green bean between her fingers, “we’re both dating him.”

Wanda very much wished she had built the teleportation device she had designed to escape this conversation.

“Oh geez, what did you three do?” Steve said from the other end. “I’m sorry, Wanda, they have no concept of tact.”

“It’s fine,” she said. Her fingers ran along the edge of the plate on the long way around to the tater tots, and Bucky shot Sharon and Sam a look that was suspicious close to an eye roll.

“So. Wanda,” Bucky said suddenly. His right hand stayed under the table, making Steve jump, but his left extended for a handshake. She took it and could feel under the dark glove the delicate whirring of an advanced prosthetic. “My friends have been so very rude”--his smirk curved further up his face as Steve’s grew redder--“so why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself. Your accent’s Sokovian, isn’t it?”

It was. “History major,” he explained. “Eastern European mainly.”

At this point in the semester, she was well-versed in the list of facts new people wanted to know and rattled it all off in a single breath: a junior physics major from Novigrad, Sokovia living in the Hereford dorm complex far up on the hill overlooking the football stadium. But they waited, seemingly wanting more. 

“What sort of physics do you do?” Natasha asked, though she didn’t appear all that interested.

“Electromagnetics, mainly,” she said. “I guess I should’ve done more with engineering because I like to design things. Professor Stark is letting me build some of it in his lab--I was just there, actually. He was showing me his latest attempt at AI--”

“Like a robot?” Sharon asked, her piece of chicken falling from her fork.

“Yeah. Only the robot… he can answer questions and learn. Things like that.”

“The robot’s a ‘he’? Robots have gender?”

“I mean…” The teleportation device was becoming more necessary by the second. “I think Professor Stark programmed him that way…?”

“Why though? Sam, why are you rolling your eyes, come on--”

“Yeah, Sam, it’s a fair question,” Bucky added.

“I think all he means is…” Natasha sighed, “is that we could save the discussion for a time when we’re not hijacking the conversation from Wanda.” She shrugged and took a large gulp from the cola in her foggy plastic glass.

At his seat at the far end, Steve looked as if he were ready to crawl into a hole. Wanda would have followed right after him.

“It’s really okay,” Wanda said. “It’s a debated topic in artificial intelligence anyway.”

They left the dining hall when it started to shut down for the evening, just after the sun had set behind the bookstore across the plaza and casting the bricks in a dark orange light. Sharon and Sam had argued relentlessly without either one of them ceding any territory to the other, and the spat continued even as their group parted ways by the library.

Steve tried to pull her aside, but she waved it away. He couldn’t control his friends, after all. It had been a kind effort, more than anyone else had extended thus far, even if it had been a total disaster.

“We’re going back to the apartment to study if you…” he shrugged.

“Thanks,” she said. “But I think I’ll focus better on my own.” She forced a bright grin to her face and hoped it would be enough to convince him to let it be, even if she knew Pietro would have been able to see past it before it had even had a chance to fully form.

Her Tuesday/Thursday block of classes ended right before lunch, so Wanda snagged a to-go box from the dining hall and headed straight towards Professor Stark’s lab. Maybe she had been moving a little quickly, as close to jogging as one could get without drawing attention to the fact, but the problem with her design that had been nagging at her shirtsleeve for weeks had materialized in the middle of her Russian class presentation. And then when she sat down, her pen had run out of ink. 

It was understandable that she would be in a hurry, right? She apologized to the couple freshmen she bumped into by the salad bar and again to the old frazzled biochemistry professor when she shouldered through the hall that led to the lab.

“Science vaits for no man--or woman, I suppose,” he murmured to himself.

Thankfully the clearest work bench in the lab had a stray slip of paper and chunk of what looked like architectural charcoal, and the equations smudged from it in a rush.

“Beautiful,” she sighed, leaning back. She wiped some of the sweat from her hairline and could feel the small flakes of charcoal sticking behind. Not that it mattered: Professor Stark wasn’t there, and while the Vision was seated across from her, his--its? their?--eyes were as dead as the first time she’d seen them. 

Besides the low hum of the bare fluorescent lights, the whole room was silent; and for the first time since the previous night, she actually felt hungry. Her fingers picked at the pile of cherry tomatoes in one corner of the box, popping a few into her mouth. They’re not candy, Wanda, Pietro’s voice said in her head. I don’t know how you can go through a whole bag of them like that.

Arguing without her brother present would have hardly been the cathartic exercise she was used to, and she didn’t feel like wasting her minutes to call him. But the Vision was a sounding board, or at least as much of one as a wall was a tennis opponent.

“If Pietro actually ate the balanced diet his trainer laid out for him,” she said slowly, “I bet he would understand why I love these things.” She paused. Eyed the Vision’s eerily realistic face. “I bet he also would have done better at the Olympic trials last year, but you didn’t hear it from me.”

The lights hummed and the Vision collected a few more motes of dust.

“You know, he spent four hours late one night clicking around Wikipedia and found out that people thought tomatoes were poisonous a couple hundred years ago,” she said. One of the tomatoes bulged between her thumb and first finger, straining against the thin film of its peel; its bright color made the Vision’s own red face seem like a deep maroon. “It must have been nearly three in the morning but he burst in my room to wake me up and tell me, like it meant he had won the argument or something. I swear,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I wanted to kill him. I think I had an English test the next day.”

(She’d done fine on the test, but that wasn’t the point of the story. The point of the story was that Pietro could be an idiot and that it was a miracle she’d survived in a womb with his tomato-loathing self for nine months.)

When she looked back down at her to-go box, the tomatoes were gone, leaving her with the soupy mess they’d called spaghetti--and no plastic fork to be found. She swore under her breath in Sokovian, just loud enough to be heard over her growling stomach. 

“Do you think Professor Stark has a stash of forks around here?” she asked herself, though she was still looking at the robot. Other than the table she had claimed, the lab was a mess, strewn with wires, the odd cut of metal, and enough fire extinguishers to tame a burning school bus--but in the far corner, on the edge of what may have once been a standard-issue desk, was a collection of energy drink cans and empty poptart wrappers. 

“Okay,” she sighed. “So no forks.” 

“Professor Erskine ought to have some--” 

Wanda screamed and whipped around to find the Vision staring back at her, eyes glowing softly.

“You--”

“He likes to bring microwavable meals for lunch,” the Vision continued, as if she wasn’t clutching her chest and waiting for her heart rate to slow. “I believe he was who you nearly ran into a bit ago. His office is down the hall.” He blinked--or did he? Would he need to blink? Were her eyes playing tricks on her? “Are you all right?”

“I didn’t know you were on!”

“Oh. Well, yes.” He reached down to his ankle and held up a thick cord. “I was charging. Tony has had a difficult time extending my battery life past a few hours.”

Her mouth tightened into a frown, and it deepened as they kept staring at each other.

She knew now: he didn’t blink.

“I’m going to ask Professor Erskine for a fork,” she said curtly. “Do you mind… going back into low power mode? I need to get some work done.”

“Of course,” he said. “I understand completely.”

His eyes had dulled once she returned, fork in hand, but she couldn’t help but sense the weight of his stare as she scrawled in the last piece of her calculations on the larger design.

Steve texted her again about dinner--sorry about last night, we were gonna go 2 the sushi joint on the corner in a few and everyone promised to behave!! 

Sushi Love was a good twenty minute hike from the physics building, but Wanda didn’t have a ready-made excuse. She scribbled a note to Professor Stark about the specific type of wires and magnets she would need to start construction of her device the next day, taping it on the Vision’s forehead so it draped over the top of the bridge of his nose.

Bucky and Sharon were already arguing by the time she got to the restaurant, their chopsticks clutching slabs of wasabi or ginger at the ends dangerously close to the other’s nostrils.

“What is it this time?” Wanda muttered to Steve.

“Same thing,” he said. Somehow there was still a grin on his face.

(Natasha, on the other hand, looked close to committing murder.)

“You still haven’t explained to me why a goddamn robot would need gender, Bucky!”

“Because maybe the professor is interested in how artificial intelligence processes a human concept like that--come on, Sharon--”

“You come on!”

After a few more minutes of this, Natasha tried to engage with Wanda: asking how her project was going, if the rumors were true about the nuclear physics professor having a real-life “Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” situation. (Yes, the project was going as well as it could have been one day in. No, she hadn’t heard anything about that professor but sure, she would look into it.)

Wanda excused herself to go before Bucky and Sharon had taken long enough breaths to get halfway through their meals, and she made herself push down the small pang of guilt as she left a couple crumpled bills with Steve to cover her share of the tab.

The sun had long set behind the buildings lining the quad, obscuring the names embossed on the porticos--but she was learning them, little by little. Cocke Hall, where the kid across the hall in her dorm took Latin and philosophy. The two adjoining buildings that shared a name, save for the Old and New tacked onto the ends. At orientation, just days after getting off the plane from Novigrad, she had been assured that this knowledge would come. “I know the campus is big and I know it’s different from what you came from, but you’ll get there. You got there before,” Dean Fury had said. “We want to give you all the resources you need to succeed here.”

So: Transfer Student Society, its mentor program.

“Not exactly foolproof, huh?” she said under her breath.

The clock on her desk read 9:30 by the time she shut the door to her room behind her. Pietro wouldn’t be up for another hour or two for his training, and even then, she would be hesitant to bother him at such an early hour. Never had been a morning person.

There was a Russian quiz to study for, anyway, wasn’t there?

The quiz was postponed, class letting out early, and Wanda ended up in Stark’s lab half an hour before she otherwise would have.

“Miss Maximoff!” He was seated in a ratty rolling chair and pushed off, sailing down the space between two rows of workbenches. “Got your note and your supplies, and!” Hopping to his feet, he came to the Vision’s side, where he held up the robot’s hand, which was gripping a box of plastic forks. “I heard about the plasticware mishap.”

Wanda wondered if the Vision was really off this time or if he was still in low-power mode. “Did you, now.”

“Y’know,” he said, motioning back to the desk in the corner, “for having no organic material in his makeup, the guy really knows a lot about nutrition.” He leaned across the table towards her and let his voice drop low. “He admonished me. Somehow managed to get Banner to bring me a salad for dinner last night, too. D’you hear that, Vizh? I ate kale.”

Professor Stark shuffled back to the other corner of the lab, fell into another rickety chair to stare glumly at a Faraday cage and some sad, half-leaking batteries.

They worked in silence for a little over an hour, and just as she was ready to start putting together the fourth copper-wire coil, the door behind her crashed open against the wall.

“Abe, man, what’s--”

“Bruce vas using my equipment again, and--”

“Say no more.”

Stark ran out after Professor Erskine without another word. Wanda was half-tempted to peer around the door frame to see what the commotion was about--wasn’t this what Natasha had mentioned the night before?--but she stayed at the workbench. Whatever it was wouldn’t leak out into the hallway.

The Vision’s hand was still lying on the surface of the workbench near where she had piled her completed copper coils, so she reached across and gave it a good couple taps. “Hey. Are you on--or, um… awake right now?”

He didn’t budge.

“Your power cord is plugged in,” she said shortly. “So are you ignoring me?”

Slowly the Vision’s fingers flexed, tapping against the workbench as the rest of him came to life. The eyes flickered before leveling out at their steady glow and lighting up the spirals of copper lying between them. “Not ignoring you, Miss Maximoff. Only giving myself enough time to power on completely.” His mouth didn’t curve up into a smile but it came close.

“You can call me Wanda. Actually,” she added. “Please do.”

“Why ‘please do’?”

“Well…” He was staring at her intently; it was likely that Professor Stark hadn’t gotten around to programming the finer details of human etiquette, so she tried not to let it make her too uncomfortable. He probably doesn’t know any better. “It’s too formal, first of all.”

The Vision nodded. “So we are friends?”

“What?”

“Formalities are for those who are not friends, correct?”

“I guess?” There were a whole host of other things she could have followed up with: “Miss Maximoff” makes me sound too old, “Ms. Maximoff” was my mother and I don’t want to get into why that won’t fly. But instead, she sighed, grinned his way. “If Professor Stark is your only friend, then I can definitely be your second.”

At that, the Vision’s face strained into the largest smile it could muster, the underlying mechanics of him whining at a subtle pitch.

“I’m glad we are friends, Wanda.”

From down the hall, something vibrated hard enough to shake the floor under their feet--followed by a metallic crash and incoherent shouting. The Vision hardly appeared phased by the whole thing, even as the crashes continued and the noise grew harder to ignore. She squinted at him as Erksine’s voice echoed down to the lab, cursing in German. “So. Friend to friend. Does this sort of thing happen often?”

The Vision squinted back, turning his head toward the wall and back again. “Professor Banner is a tad bit impulsive with his experimental studies, from what I gather. I’m not sure why it’s always an emergency.”

There must have been a reason, seeing as the rumors had woven their way into the humanities majors; Natasha hadn’t said yet what she was studying, but judging from the book spines visible from her open backpack, it probably had something to do with politics or public policy.

“Is there a reason you’re curious, Wanda?” the Vision said.

“I feel like I should know, is all,” she said. “I’m here enough, and if it’s potentially dangerous--”

“Oh, it’s not dangerous.”

“Really,” she said.

“Really!” the Vision said. “Professor Banner just gets excited.” He paused, letting one of his fingers slowly point at the collection of copper coils that she had assembled while eyeing the scribbled bits of calculations on the paper covering the rest of the workbench. “Dr. Stark is very interested in your work, you know. He said it could be groundbreaking.”

Groundbreaking. Now there was a word reserved for Pietro’s sprinting potential or for the politics of the new Sokovian prime minister at every election cycle.

“You don’t believe me?” he asked.

“Why do you say that?”

“Patterns in your facial expression indicate doubt.” The chair he was sitting in squeaked on the tile flooring as he stood up to examine her designs more closely, his hands lightly gliding along the arrows she drew for herself tracing the lines of logic the calculations followed. “Which, for me, is difficult to process. This is extraordinary.”

Glancing up from the designs, he started staring head-on again, and Wanda didn’t know what quite to do. Compliments were always tricky territory--that was something Pietro had excelled at handling more than her--so she laughed and tried to wave it all away. The Vision kept staring. Harder, even.

“I don’t understand why you’re laughing. I wasn’t telling a joke.”

“Do you tell jokes?” She leaned forward and propped her chin in her hand, whatever counted as the Vision’s pupils following the movement. “Is that part of your whole--”

“I’m programmed to learn, Miss--Wanda,” he corrected himself. “If I was to be around Dr. Stark for any extended period of time, I would have to learn about humor at some point.”

A tight, lopsided grin crawled onto her face despite herself. “Tell me one.”

“Sorry?”

“What’s your favorite joke?”

The Vision brought his hand towards his face, delicately laid the first finger at the center of his bottom lip. It was the same thinking pose Wanda had seen Professor Ross fall into if she lost her place explaining the example problem on the board during lecture.

“Did you hear about the camping trip Dr. Stark took with Dr. Banner?” he said. He looked at her expectantly, and after a few long moments with neither of them saying anything, she shook her head. “They said it was in tents.” He paused again. “You know, it’s a play on words--”

“You don’t have to explain,” she said, smiling. “I understood it.”

“I only wanted to be sure.”

Down the hall, one of the many doors slammed shut, followed by Professor Stark speaking tersely to whoever was with him--a voice Wanda didn’t recognize. She quickly pulled over a couple stray wires from a pile she had made and ducked her head, feigning concentration, when they entered the lab.

“All I’m saying is that if y’all don’t want Bruce getting into the radiation lab with every whim he gets, then you have to invest in a keycard system. Some kind of access control, at least.”

Professor Stark rolled his eyes, offering no attempt at subtlety. “Rhodey. Rhodes. Jimmy, my man--”

“Oh boy, here we go.”

“--it’s not that simple. I really wish it was. Banner is going to move too quickly and the next thing you know, he’ll have a tentacle sticking out of his forehead,” he said. Rhodes stared at him, arms crossed and waiting for him to continue. “Look,” he said. “I’ve tried. Proposed the idea to Dean Potts a couple semesters ago and believe it or not, it didn’t get anywhere…”

Professor Stark turned on his heel and shuffled into the back room as he continued to chatter on about red tape and logistical difficulties and bureaucratic nightmares with pretty faces--to himself at first, but Rhodes followed him after a beat.

When Wanda looked back up, the Vision’s eyes were locked on her. “Well. I should probably go. Considering.”

The Vision nodded, staying silent as she packed up her things and shuffled the materials on the workbench into some semblance of order. He offered a wave, and by the time she checked over her shoulder in the doorway, he had already shifted back into low power mode.

The first signs of the autumn rainstorms had started to roll in as the week began to taper off on Thursday afternoon; by Saturday, the storm drains on the sidewalk corners were starting to snatch loose shoes from the feet of ill-prepared students and the brassy echoes of the marching band had fallen silent while the football game was put on rain delay. Or: at least that was what America, a freshman across the hall, had told her.

“My girlfriend is in colorguard,” she said, nodding down to the phone in her hands. “All their flags are soaked, which… according to Kate…” She squinted at the text. “...means they’re going to be ‘twirling colonies of mold monsters’ for the next week.”

America jogged toward the stairwell with an umbrella and some cheap plastic ponchos to drop off for Kate and the rest of the guard, and Wanda was left with her laptop and the tiny window that overlooked the sparse trees dotting the hill down to the main road. Pietro had canceled their Skype call--something about double checking his old ankle injury--which meant she had no one to discuss the email from Professor Stark open in her inbox.

(That had been one of the nice things about sharing their apartment in Novigrad. Twins always understood each other’s problems, even when they couldn’t find the words to express the finer details. Halfway across the world, it got harder, and when the silence pressed in around her when she needed his dumb snarky reassurance, it was like she was halfway to losing a limb.)

Miss Maximoff,

Rhodey told me to tell you that the whole thing you saw at the lab the other day isn’t anything you need to worry about. I didn’t think you were since, you know, you’re smart, but he insisted.

Anyway. Just wanted to say again that I’m looking forward to sharing lab space this year. And Vizh is, too. He seems to have taken a liking to you, which is saying something because I made him and he didn’t like me for at least three weeks. (If you ask him, he’ll deny the whole thing but trust me. It was terrifying. Have I told you about my first attempt at AI? Terrible. Awful. Nearly lost my tenure. Didn’t want that to happen again.)

If Rhodey asks if I sent you this, please tell him yes. I’ll never hear the end of it otherwise.

Cheers,

TS

Wanda could hear Pietro now: what kind of teachers do they have over in America? That, and the prodding questions he would circle back to about the near loss of tenure, it would all turn into a rant about how she deserved better--than what, he would never quite specify--and that he deserved better than the cracked track where he trained, and that it would all right itself eventually, but in the meantime, how about some pancakes?

What she couldn’t hear, though, was the glib reaction about the Vision. Precedent only laid tracks down so far--it had to come to a halt somewhere.

The list of options ran through her head: she could sit here and mull it over alone, or she could text Steve (if he wasn’t soaked to the bone at the game), or she could press forward with one of the acquaintances she’d met at Hillel the night before. No, that last one would have been too much too soon. Kitty and Bobby were nice enough, but what was she supposed to say? My professor said his robot likes me, and it was obvious that he did so I don’t know why he would mention it so explicitly.

Not a great second impression.

Not a great fifth or sixth impression for Steve either, and knowing the company he kept, seeing this debated in abstract for days on end was at the bottom of her to-do list.

The rain was falling harder now. A few of the leaves that had started to turn early were pulled from their branches and joining the muddy muck at the roots, and the view of the street grew hazier. No signs of America hiking back up the hill from the stadium, nor of any of the rest of the student body--everyone was sticking it out waiting for the game to restart or holed up wherever they would be for the rest of the day. A dense community of thousands closed off behind their brick and mortar walls: it felt too similar to the Novigrad of her childhood when the fires finally fizzled out and the smoke started to clear.

Whatever Professor Stark had said wouldn’t matter until Monday, and even then, that was questionable. She shut the door to her room and pulled up The Dazzler’s latest album, pressing the volume up on her headphones until it was just nudging past the point of comfortable.

The semester marched onwards.

As the weeks piled up on top of each other, Wanda noticed the classmates she sat next to in lecture shift into a permanently-frazzled state of being, clutching cups of coffee two sizes larger than they had been. Catching dinner with Steve only sometimes included the full group; their arrangement at the usual table in Newcomb was pockmarked by empty chairs. The slow trickle of midterm season had set in, and so had the inklings of panic.

At lunch that day, Steve and Natasha had both lamented how Bucky’s course load gave him three long papers all due within four days of each other--they hadn’t seen him in nearly a week. “It’s messing with my own means of coping with stress,” Natasha had grumbled, rubbing at a dark circle under her eye. And Steve had nodded, albeit with a tinge more embarrassment.

Even final exams at her university in Sokovia hadn’t caused such a fuss, though she made a point not to mention that.

Those weeks, the lab was much quieter than usual. Instead of the usual zaps and muttering coming from Professor Stark’s end of the room, he was hunched over a small cleared portion of his desk where his elbow came dangerously close to knocking a thick stack of exams down to the floor. One of them was hers, she knew, but it didn’t do to dwell. She had moved on from the coils to soldering together bits of metal and specialized plastic to form their casing, and it required all of her concentration.

Not that the Vision paid that detail any mind. The first day that she had tried to work the flame to melt the two pieces together, the tips of her fingers had come away with a burn, skin red and pushing up to unwrinkle the evidence of her fingerprint. And his little robot mouth had dropped open in shock before he scurried to the first aid cabinet for the proper treatment.

“I could have gotten it,” she said. “And I could get this too,” she added.

Her hand was lying palm up in his as he applied the salve and wrapped the small butterfly bandages on the burns. He said nothing, didn’t even offer a tick of his face to respond to an insistence that he was overreacting--but the burns had started to throb, even with the salve, so she kept her mouth shut.

When she wasn’t handling open flame, the Vision tried his hand at conversation when a lull had lingered for a few minutes too long. The questions she had come to expect from robots thanks to years of science fiction came from him rapid-fire: I know what food is but I still don’t understand taste, is being tired like when my battery is low, how are humans not scared all the time if they know they’re going to die?

And she tried her best at answering them.

It’s when the brain registers the food when it’s in our mouth. It can tell you what’s in it, sometimes. 

You have to tell me what it feels like when you’re battery’s low, Vision. (She had started calling him “Vision” to his face; the article felt misplaced, as if she was treating him like an object instead of a sentient being.)

Sorry, this bit is pretty difficult--I have to concentrate.

One Saturday, Wanda had convinced Professor Stark to loan her a key to the lab--it was homecoming weekend, the entire campus was thumping with noise and a glut of people, and she needed an excuse to give Steve and Natasha when they inevitably blew up her phone with an invitation to the party off frat row Natasha’s new friend swore he could get them into.

10:06 PM, and the text came right on time: the archery club knows how to have a good time and it’s small, nothing like that pre-law society fight club wannabe clusterfuck. steve and i can meet you at the northline stop by your dorm

10:10 PM, and the follow-up from Steve only included a series of emojis her phone couldn’t display. The long lines of squares weren’t the least bit convincing.

“Is that your friends?” Vision asked, nodding toward the phone as she sent them both a bland excuse about workload and the beginning of a cold. “Stark says a lot of the students stay up very late on the weekends consuming intoxicating beverages. That’s what they’re after, isn’t it?”

Wanda stopped sanding down the edge of a metal disk and raised an eyebrow. “Indeed it is.”

“Don’t you want to join them?”

Shrugging, she gestured to the metal filings, wires, and crumpled bits of scrap graph paper strewn on the workbench between them. “I’m in the middle of this. It’ll disrupt my flow.”

“You can work here any day you like, though.”

“It’s also not my last weekend at university,” she said lightly. “I’ll live, and so will they.”

Vision nodded, and she turned back to sanding the disk. One arc of it had cut oddly, Professor Stark had said, and it was taking much longer than she anticipated to shape it to where it needed to be; but it wasn’t a mentally-taxing task, so even with her eyes firmly on the metal in her hands, she could still see Vision behind it, out of focus and almost squirming.

“Are you all right?” she asked, not looking up.

“Well, Wanda, I couldn’t help but think--”

“Spit it out.”

He sighed--or, he made a noise similar to it, heaving his shoulders in a way she’d seen Professor Stark do in lecture when that annoying Hammer kid asked another dumb question. “You said joining your friends would ‘disrupt your flow,’ and I was worried that my presence could possibly distract you and cause the same effect.”

“Of course not, you’re fine,” she said, glancing up. “I like having you here.”

“You do?”

“I do. It’s nice.”

His face went out of focus again as she turned back to the disk, though not enough to blur out the grin. “I think you’re very nice, too,” he said quietly, and a hand seized at her heart. It squeezed out the smile that Pietro would have to see before he stopped obnoxiously trying to cheer her up--all in one soft, swift statement.

It was close to 2 AM by the time she left for the night, stepping out into the aftermath of a rainshower with the few leaves still stuck on their branches shrugging off forgotten drops onto her head. She could call Pietro now at this hour, especially on a Sunday. And she really ought to, after all. It had been weeks since their last actual conversation, and what better time than the dark walk back to her dorm from a wild night at the lab?

He picked up halfway through the third ring.

“Wandushka! Wait, wait,” he said in Sokovian, then adding slowly in English, “Coach Antova wants me to practice my speaking so I don’t sound like an idiot at Worlds if they interview me. You remember--”

“You made me promise never to speak of it again, I know. But don’t expect me to repeat myself three times,” she said. And maybe she said it a tad faster than she would have otherwise. Maybe.

“Aye, sister dear, what time is it over there?”

“Late.” Across the street, the winding paths of a couple drunk freshmen had gotten tripped up by the vehicle barriers in front of the chemistry building. One of them had fallen backwards onto their ass, flat into a shallow puddle, and the two of them were laughing and going on about who knew what. The distinctive rumble of a bus was rounding the corner to that stop, so at least they’d get carried to where they needed to go if they weren’t close already. “I was just at the lab--”

Pietro groaned into the phone. “Late on a Saturday night? I was hoping you were doing something fun--”

“The lab is fun--”

“Psh. Here I was hoping you were giving your brother a ring because you met someone at a party and needed love advice.” He sat on the vowel of “love” a little longer than what would have been cute.

“I would never be that desperate.”

The bus screeched to a stop in front of the two across the street. By the time its doors creaked shut and it bumbled off again, they were gone.

“You’re lying!"

“Am not.”

“Then why did you absolutely need to call me?”

Maybe I wanted to hear your voice in real time for a change instead of over goddamn Snapchat!--but she bit her tongue, swallowed the retort. His smug humming sat in her ear as he waited, and nothing was coming to mind that would get him to drop the subject because maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.

“I was thinking,” she found herself saying suddenly, “I made friends with this AI bot my professor put together. He’s really neat--we should facetime soon so you can talk to him.”

The small quad by the freshman dorms was empty of its usual crowd at this hour; as she passed, two arms stretched up toward the sky, leading down to two bodies sprawled on the sidewalk. Stargazing probably, or--as the pile of books and binders suggested--maybe tackling astronomy homework despite the clouds.

“Why would I want to talk to a robot?”

“He’s not like the one Mr. Milojević had in high school,” she said. Her phone buzzed against her ear, but she ignored it. “I spend enough time talking about you and everything back home that he’s bound to be curious.” Which was true: she had come to the lab one afternoon to find Vision watching a video of Pietro at the European Track Championships a few years earlier.

(“This is him, right? I can see the resemblance.”)

“Fine,” he sighed. “Next week, though. Antova is going to try to kill me at practice by Friday, I think.”

“You say that every time I talk to you, and yet you’re still alive.”

“Why do you sound disappointed?” He waited for her to laugh, which she did. Right on time. “Don’t answer that. Go to bed, Wandushka. Okay? Your inventions will still be there when you wake up.”

When they hung up, the campus around her was unnaturally quiet. Buses on their routes had wandered far from the stops around the stadium and the gym. The lights dotting the sidewalk were starting to flicker, indecisive on whether they should click off for good. Somewhere on the other side of the stadium, someone was shouting and a song was nudged closer to the noise ordinance limits--but it was far, the echo only audible because of the lack of anything else.

Wanda’s phone buzzed again, the third of three Snapchats from Natasha.

The first: her unsmiling face while Bucky and Sam pressed against Steve either side on the dance floor, captioned “kill me.”

The second: Sam’s head resting on Steve’s shoulder and close to Bucky’s ear, Natasha’s eyes gone wider and the caption switched to all-caps.

The third: Steve and Sam’s faces tipped together and open-mouthed as Bucky reaches around for Sam’s hips to pull them both closer; Natasha’s face covered by an enlarged skull emoji, “nevermind” running under the cartoon eye sockets.

This, she thought to herself, this is what I one hundred percent do not mind missing out on. The conceding voice opposite her in her head took on Vision’s tone, the careful way he held the words on his processor-tongue. She couldn’t text him the punctuation to the point she had been trying to make--couldn’t text or call or email, but she imagined the look on his face, wondered what his laugh would sound like.

(And at the back of her mind she thought to herself, more silent than the rest of the ideas floating around there, if the thrum of electricity made his hands warm or if they would be as cold as Novigrad in winter.)

“Okay,” Sharon said at lunch a week and a half later. “Things are obviously complicated…” 

Except for the new guy whose name Wanda still hadn’t been told, the rest of the group was pointedly staring at their uneaten food--not that Wanda thought they were embarrassed, since that didn’t seem to come easily for them, but Sharon appeared a little too gleeful at being the one to explain the developments.

“Some of this is old news, but y’know, not living in our off-campus neighborhood, you might miss some things.”

“I got the Snapchats,” Wanda said.

“The what?” Bucky said quickly, but Natasha muttered something to him in Russian that was too fast for Wanda to pick up.

Sharon’s grin fell into something more like a grimace. “Step one is taken care of at least!” Again Wanda was reintroduced to the diagrams with fries standing in for people--Sharon set up the previous situation with Steve, Bucky, Sam, and Natasha, throwing in a mushy boiled green bean on one side. “This little bean here is our new friend Clint.”

The guy on the other side of Natasha offered a small wave--one of his fingers was in a splint and the bandage across his nose had a maroon stripe along the center that was threatening to soak up to the top.

“Clint and Natasha are kind of seeing each other,” Sharon said, rolling her eyes a bit when she turned back to Wanda. “But Natasha is also still with Bucky, who’s still with Steve, and they both hooked up with Sam that Saturday.” Pause. “At the same time.” The fry that was supposed to represent Sam squeezed itself into a pile with Steve and Bucky’s.

“Sure you don’t want in on this spiderweb?” Natasha asked with a subtle wink in Sharon’s direction.

(Wanda had never seen someone flush that red so quickly.)

Sam quickly changed the subject to the latest questionable remark his Tibetan Buddhism professor made during lecture, eliciting groans from everyone else in the group that had heard the full context over the course of the semester--Sam’s story made mention of when Professor Strange told them about the year had spent in Lhasa, which she must have missed. She mirrored Steve’s grimace and turned back to her salad.

The conversation Pietro and Vision had shared that weekend was short and largely insubstantial, but it kept meandering back into her thoughts whenever she tuned out the conversation of the hour. The two of them had relied on stilted formalities, as if they were giving a presentation for the class in English 101, but with the narrowed eyes in search of some ulterior motive that she couldn’t begin to pin down.

“He seems very nice,” Vision said when they hung up.

“Please tell me that’s not your only friend,” Pietro texted a few moments later.

Of course he isn’t, she’d sent him back.

Lying to her brother was something she actively tried to avoid, but as the clock on the far wall ticked closer to the start of everyone’s next classes, she couldn’t remember if she had said a word since sitting down with her food, much less if anyone else at the table had noticed.

Not that she cared, really. Not that much.

But maybe she would skip out on holing herself up in the Alderman Library stacks and pound out the problem set in the lab instead.

When she poked her head in the lab that afternoon, it was empty--Vision’s charging cord was left plugged into the wall, but the chunky end she saw bulging out from his hip hung precariously on the edge of the table by his empty stool. If Professor Stark had many any plans to take Vision on official Physics or Engineering Department business, he would have been going on about it the second he found out; otherwise, she couldn’t think of a situation where he would let his pride and joy of an AI roam free on campus before any such debut.

The oddity of the situation had settled into an uneasy sway in her stomach when she heard the crash down the hall--same distance away as the last time she’d been here to witness Professor Banner’s erratic nature from afar. Vision said it wasn’t dangerous, she told herself and opened her linear algebra textbook where she’d stuck the half-crumpled sheet of notebook paper. Even the vocabulary flashcards for Russian looked more enticing than this eigenvector nonsense--

Another slam, a hand on a table this time, more shouting. Professor Stark’s voice, garbled through the walls, followed by approaching feet in the hallway. One set clanged more metallically than the others.

She was already turned around on her stool by the time they got to the doorway of the lab: Professor Stark with whom she assumed was Professor Banner, with Vision standing awkwardly behind them. “If it’s a bad time, I can leave,” she said.

“You didn’t tell me you actually offered the lab to her,” Professor Banner said to Professor Stark under his breath. “I thought it was a hypothetical. Clearly”--he jerked his thumb over his shoulder at Vision--“you’re doing fewer of those every day. There’s procedure for this sort of thing, you know. University liability--”

“Oh, now you’re talking about procedure, Doctor ‘let me sprint into the gamma radiation lab with no protective gear’ is talking to me about procedure?”

“I wasn’t the one who created a murderbot--”

“You helped--”

“You didn’t tell me what the equations were for, Tony--”

They pushed past each other into the lab, fueled by their bickering, and still Wanda was unsure if she should leave--Professor Stark obviously had no qualms about having it out with her present, but the other way around was proving to be a different matter. The more worked up Professor Banner became, the more his arms flung about, knocking into a cabinet and bookcase and sending papers flying. Before too long, he was likely to accidentally kick the blowtorch on or knock a sharp object toward someone’s eye.

And Vision--he was still frozen in the doorway, a grimace contorting the whole of his face.

She nodded and assembled her things, grabbing his elbow as she hurried down the hall. “What happened?”

“Tony wanted me to meet Dr. Banner,” he said. “Which I advised against. There’s… well.” He pulled back against her grip and they stopped in the middle of the hall. His shoulders heaved as if he were breathing heavily and urging his heart rate to slow. “Dr. Erskine often speaks about taking walks outside when he needs to clear his head. Could we try that, perhaps?”

While his build was that of a human, there was no way for him to realistically pass as one the way he was now: the green parts of his body could have been a skin-tight full-body suit if they were lucky, but the dark red tint of his head and arms--

“I’ve been very badly sunburned,” Vision offered.

“No,” she said, trying and failing to hide her laughter. “Not even I get sunburned that badly. Wait,” she added, holding up a finger. Mashed down to the bottom of her bag was a winter hat she’d bought at the university merchandise store right off-campus. She got on her tiptoes and pulled it over his head, almost covering his eyes. “I think I have an idea.”

Graduate students, she had quickly figured out from Professor Stark, could be a spacy lot from the combination of stress, lack of sleep, and IV drip of coffee hiding in their bags--and the physics doctoral students in particular were notorious for leaving stray items of clothing in the small locker closet and refusing to claim them.

Which is precisely how Vision was able to accompany her down to the Dell behind the physics building without any turned heads--one winter hat from her bag, one pair of University of Michigan sweatpants aged from someone’s undergrad, and a slightly stained lab coat with pockets big enough to hide his hands.

“I feel a little ridiculous,” he said. They had walked to the far side of the Dell, where Sharon had told Wanda of a bench tucked back in the trees at a perfect angle to watch the ducks in the pond.

Wanda had taken a few steps back toward the bench but stopped when Vision only inched closer to the edge of the sidewalk toward the small grassy embankment. In the corner of the embankment and the stone wall that jutted out halfway across the pond there was a duck with its head tucked under its wing. It shuddered in its sleep, and Vision smiled, turning towards her.

“Thank you for coming here with me, Wanda.”

“Of course.”

His eyes were glued to the duck.

“This is the first time that I have been outdoors myself,” he said slowly. “But I have memories of the outdoors. Snow caught in the latticework on Gilmer Hall and the sidewalk salt turning the ice to slush. Dr. Banner has reason to be upset with Tony, you know.”

The wind had picked up and pushed ripples into the water’s surface; the duck bobbed against the wall, bouncing away from the corner and toward the center of the pond.

“Are you talking about the, uh…murderbot?”

He nodded. “The problem with AI, he told me, wasn’t getting the engineering right, but the psychology. He didn’t anticipate that with Ultron, and it was almost a disaster. The problem was that some of the material he needed to build another version was too expensive, so he reused it. Some memories stuck around.” His hands were pushed against the bottom seams of the lab coat pockets but the fists were visible through the material. “I don’t have the same problems of course,” he added quickly. “Tony got Dr. Xavier to help him this time. He’s the head of the Psychology Department.”

His eyes were still on the duck; it was awake now, kicking back to the opposite embankment where the other four had settled into the grass.

“Professor Banner wasn’t upset with you, was he?”

“Oh no,” Vision said. “He just thought Tony was being foolish. And he was. But it was still his foolishness that brought me into this world, even with the added burden of Ultron’s memories.” His head twitched in her direction, and she caught a glimpse of a smile overpowering his despondence. “But it is my understanding that humans often have a complicated relationship with their parents, so I suppose I’m fortunate to have that bit of realism in my existence.”

Of course it was bound to come to this; Wanda’s hands gripped at her sides, and she hoped that the impending November chill would be enough of an excuse. It was just the wind, see, and it had blown the thick clouds in front of the sun, and that sort of change in temperature got to humans a lot faster than it did for robots. 

“You’ve never mentioned your parents,” he said. “That’s likely intentional, isn’t it?”

She nodded. “It is.”

“Understood.” He made a noise like a sigh, craning his neck to examine the trees on the bank to their far left and the crumbling stone arch, all that remained of a house that had stood by the Dell when the university was first founded.

There was a squeeze at her elbow, and she looked down to find that Vision had placed his hand there as he looped his arm with hers.

“When Pietro and I were kids,” she said, “there was a lot of unrest in Eastern Europe. Soviet Bloc breaking up, borders getting drawn and redrawn, and… bombs changing hands. Too easily, probably.”

“I see.”

She reached around to pull down the sleeve of the arm linked with his--a thick line of scar tissue ran along the skin above her elbow. “Pietro and I lived. His scar is bigger than mine. On his calves, too. The commentators at his tournaments remark on it every time because they can never resist spinning a Sokovian sob-story.”

Vision pulled his arm closer, taking her with it, and she rested her head against the joint of his shoulder--warm to the touch even through the lab coat, and the hand that had started to reach up and grip at the familiar lump in her throat eased until its presence faded away to nothing.

“You’re very brave,” Vision said.

She snorted before she could stop herself. “Sorry,” she said quickly. “I… dealing with my life as it’s played out isn’t brave. It’s just living. If anything, you’re the brave one.”

Vision glanced down at her with a perplexed frown--and it became more comical the longer he held it and as the ducks across the Dell began angrily quacking at one another. “I don’t understand.”

“You’re the only one like you,” she said. “I would think that’s very lonely.”

“I’m not lonely at all. I have you.” His brow softened before he hurriedly turned his attention back to the ducks--their quacking had been redirected toward a student approaching them with the heels of a loaf of bread. They didn’t wait long to flee back to the main sidewalk, but one duck made like it was going to follow them all the way back to their dorm.

“Vicious things, aren’t they?” she said.

“Indeed.” He squirmed, readjusting the set of his feet. “Wanda--” And he wasn’t gazing over at the gang of ducks anymore, instead looking past them, through them. Into the trees and down the road where the arc of the basketball arena’s roof loomed over everything, and even still his focus was elsewhere. “In my time as a conscious being I’ve had a lot of time to study the intricacies of human interaction and emotion, and I believe that there is--well, I have analyzed my database of human faces and I appreciate the aesthetic qualities of yours the most.”

He squirmed again, moving his hand cautiously down toward her wrist, where she met him halfway--his fingers were cold, but the spaces between them hummed a small wave of heat each time they twitched.

“That’s kind of you to say,” Wanda whispered. Her heart rate had picked back up and it was thudding against her ear drum loudly enough that she wondered if Vision could hear it as well; but even if he couldn’t, it was likely enough he could sense the quickening pulse in her grip on his hand.

“I didn’t say it to be kind. I said it to be honest.” And then he was looking her straight in the eyes more earnestly than anyone she had ever met. “I have learned quite a bit about humans, but there is still much I don’t understand. Such as… kissing… and why, despite my lack of understanding, I still would very much like to kiss you--”

Wanda cradled the side of his face with her free hand and pulled his face to meet hers, kissing him softly. His lips smiled into it, only growing wider when they pulled apart. “How about now?”

“Oh… that is very pleasant--if a bit unsanitary for two biological beings. But why it’s so pleasant…” Both of his hands took to her waist, tugged her close--and Vision leaned down to kiss her again, the material lining his face pliant and gentle enough to chase away the thought that whom she was kissing wasn’t human, not in the technical sense. He kissed clumsily, unsure of himself.

“Still so many mysteries,” he murmured. His fingers traced up the arc of her cheekbone, catching a stray lock of hair and tucking it behind her ear.

“Well,” she said. “It’s a good thing you don’t have to figure them out alone, then.”

Vision’s hands worried at his collar, tugging the corners down past the line of the sweater he was wearing overtop of it. The whole ensemble didn’t fit him quite right--taken from a combination of the backs of Professors Banner and Erskine’s closets--and the collar in particular had been folded into itself for so long that the wrinkles were now likely an irreversible part of it. 

“I feel ridiculous, Wanda,” he said.

“You look fine. Listen.” She hopped in front of him, took both of his hands in hers as they stopped on the corner of the block. “A few hours at this party, and you’re going to feel like the least ridiculous person here. I promise.”

“But--”

“You’ve heard me talk about my other friends, right?”

“Yes--”

“It’s Nat’s twenty-first birthday,” she reminded him. “And we’re officially on Thanksgiving Break.”

He reabsorbed the facts for the fifth time in as many hours, finally nodding to himself, eyes closed. “Are you sure they’re going to find this--how did you describe it--endearing?”

“Absolutely.”

He leaned down to kiss her on the temple. “Well. Once more unto the breach, then.”

Only one house on the side street had any lights on, the rest long abandoned by students well on their way home for a long weekend with their families; most of them, Wanda found as the break had crept closer, didn’t have anywhere to go and turned the holiday into a jumble of birthday festivities for Natasha and bonding together to try not to burn the kitchen down come Thursday night.

Wanda barely had raised her hand to knock on the door when Bucky flung it open--he was already at a stumbling level of drunk. “Wanda you made it!” he shouted, then turning to Vision: “Holy shit, you did bring him!”

“Hello,” Vision said with a wave.

“Dude--” Bucky slung an arm around Vision’s shoulder and yanked him into the living room and back into the kitchen where Sam and Helen were dumping handles of vodka, gin, and a couple different flavors of fruit juice into a water cooler.

As soon as Wanda shut the door behind her, a pair of arms latched around her and her face was full of red hair. “I’m so glad you made it! And that we finally get to meet this boyfriend of yours--and,” Natasha said pointedly, pulling back to look her in the eye, “I told Sharon and Bucky not to bother him with that old debate they had, by the way.”

“Thanks,” Wanda said. “And happy birthday--oh!” Natasha shoved a hard cider into her hand and led her by the hand to the couch; Steve was settled deep into the middle cushion, biting at the edge of his solo cup as he watched Clint and Sharon attempt to suss out the one dance the marching band did before each football game. Natasha fell onto one side of Steve and Wanda made her way to the other.

“That does--it doesn’t look right,” Steve half-slurred with a hand held up as if it could stop the travesty unfolding in front of him. “Why are you jumping so much?”

“Because they jump so much?” Clint said. “My protege on the archery team is in the band and I have her word that there’s this much jumping--”

“Ignore him,” Sharon said. “He’s just jealous.” A few drops of the concoction in her own cup flew over the lip of it as she gave Clint a reassuring pat on the shoulder. Her footing was wavering, unsteady, but they both launched themselves back into their own rendition of the dance as if they were as sober as a Monday morning.

From the kitchen Wanda heard the distinctive clank of thick glass on counter-top, the last sound anyone hears before the burning notes of a shot hit the back of their throats. “When did you all start drinking?”

Natasha frowned. “Steve, when was Helen’s last class?”

“I think she got out of immunology at 3:50?”

“Yeah, so like 4:30,” Natasha said. “So kind of late relative to years past.”

Vision still hadn’t emerged from the kitchen after Bucky led him there--part of her wanted to worry but the other side was louder, able to drown out the rest of her anxieties. Professor Stark, since discovering them at the Dell after his fight with Professor Banner that day, had slowly been letting him venture into the outside world of the university, and aside from a misunderstanding with the clerk at Alderman Library, everything had worked out perfectly.

She took another swig of the cinder, and as the carbonation tingled down her throat Bucky emerged from the kitchen with four shot glasses full of some amber liquid slotted into the gaps of his prosthetic hand’s fingers. “I know there’s three people here who want Fireball, and someone’s gotta take the fourth because Vizh here is a party pooper--”

“I quite literally can’t drink anything, much less alcohol,” Vision sighed.

“Anyway, someone please take the shot because no one wants to see Sam lose it over the side of the porch again--”

“Fuck you, Barnes--”

“I look forward to it,” Bucky said with a wink.

“Hand it here.” Wanda held out her arm and beckoned the shot glass forward. “Your American liquor doesn’t scare me.” A low chorus of “ooooh” rumbled through the room and she rolled her eyes.

As soon as Bucky handed it to her, she tipped it back--the hot cinnamon burned the back of her throat, but it was a mild sting compared to the homemade brew their neighbors used to make in their bathtubs that eroded the finish on the cheap Russian porcelain.

“Hardly a flinch!” Sam said.

“Exactly.” She stood, maneuvering around the small crowd to where Vision stood near the corner. The more steps she took, the more the alcohol soaked into her head; it didn’t have the potency of anything Sokovian, but her tolerance had waned since she came to the United States. Already the edges of her perception had gone all fuzzy.

Vision was watching Sam and Clint pull a fold-out table from the closet and push some empty solo cups into a game of beer pong. Sharon and Natasha declared themselves a team, and Clint elbowed Helen a few times to see if she would help him avenge his girlfriend.

“Is that what Nat is?” Helen asked. “Seems like kind of a complicated situation.”

Helen nodded to one of Sharon’s hands, which was tucked quite obviously into Natasha back jeans pocket--Bucky and Sam cackled into their hands, and Vision smiled quietly to himself.

“I like your friends,” Vision whispered in Wanda’s ear. “They want us both to come to Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday.” His smile hadn’t grown any larger, but only because he was fighting to keep it in check--the sight warmed her to the core of her chest.

The beer pong game was unmerciful, over before it began with Clint’s eagle-eye aim; but Steve and Sam had already vanished themselves back into the kitchen, fighting the careful stack of boxes and cans shoved into the fridge to pull out the target of their mission. The pan Sam had cradled in his arms held a cake with a sloppy icing job and illegible Cyrillic characters between the twenty-one candles.

“Pretend these candles are lit, Nat, okay?” Sam yelled.

A glob of frosting plopped over the edge of the pan with how hard she blew and the entire room erupted into shouting--Clint took the chance to stick a couple fingers into the corner to scoop up a chunk of cake, Steve catching him by the wrist only to admit they didn’t need the decorum of proper table manners anyway. One hand mashed full of cake and the other holding a tilted cup of the concoction from the water cooler, they all settled down into the ratty chairs and couches pushed to the walls.

Wanda pulled out her phone and opened up Snapchat, taking a panning video of the entire living room: the messy fingers covered in cake, the empty solo cup Bucky had just dropkicked down the hall. See, I do have friends, she captioned it. Sent it to Pietro, then tugged at the sleeve of Vision’s sweater. “I have to have some evidence of you all dressed up like this,” she said.

So he settled his head into the angle of her shoulder, offering his own version of a sigh that he had perfected to a T--the sound, the particular way his chest and shoulders heaved with it, all down to the gentle grin that settled on his face. Even if she hadn’t explicitly told him the nature of her relationship with Vision, Pietro would be able to pick it up from this, that much she was sure of--especially since she added a large heart emoji above their heads.

“What do you think he’s going to say?” Vision asked.

“It’ll be fine.”

“That’s not what I asked.” He raised his eyebrows pointedly.

“I don’t care what he says.” She pressed a kiss to his shoulder. “Neither should you.”

“But I do,” he said. “He’s your twin brother--”

“And my problem.” The toothy smile she gave him was enough to make him concede the point, and she sent the picture on its way. This wasn’t a conversation she had wanted to have outside the confines of her dorm or the lab, much less at Natasha’s birthday--the easing of anxieties was best done behind closed doors when the prying wandering eyes of a third party weren’t setting the stage for their own commentary.

She could hear Pietro now, and wanted to give Vision the same reassurance her head was supplying: okay, Wandushka, if you love the robot you should date the robot… all I wanted was for you to be happy in America, you know--

The room glowed with it: Vision’s electric warmth, the spluttering laughter after one of Sam’s jokes, the drinks running through her veins. It fought against the chill settling into the earth, beating back the old worry that she had packed into her suitcase at the end of the stifling Sokovian summer until it was the only place it had left to exist.