Flufftober 2023

It’s been one week since the Liberation Day celebration. Vision never made it to her balcony, but Wanda can’t stop dreaming about him. When the wind rustles the trees outside her window at night, she half expects to find him there, waiting for her with an apology and some perfectly reasonable explanation for his absence.

Wanda knows it’s silly. She spent all of four hours with this man. Of course he didn’t show up. That’s some fairy tale bullshit and she knows it.

Still, she misses him, and something about the whole ordeal seems… strange. At least in her experience, men tend to disappear after spending the night, but Vision vanished before following up on a fairly direct invitation to her bed. That’s weird, right? Unless he didn’t enjoy himself, but he really seemed to, and… ugh. Wanda’s spinning out about this.

Wanda’s spinning out about this and she can’t figure out if it’s just that she was extremely attracted to him or if it’s something more than that. It seems absurd to have, what, a crush? On a man she spent four fucking hours with? Yeah, right. It’s just because he’s hot and she hasn’t slept with anyone in a long time.

At least, that’s what she tells herself while she justifies thinking about him while she falls asleep. Because, really, she’s mostly thinking about his mouth, and how his hands felt on her back when he kissed her, and how rough his voice sounded when he whispered to her, and—anyway, Wanda finds herself too turned on to sleep. Again. Absurd.

“Absolutely ridiculous,” she mutters to herself as she reaches into her night table for her vibrator. It can’t hurt, though. Just a harmless fantasy about a guy she didn’t actually get to fuck, so, like, of course he’s good at it in her head. Thrill of the chase or whatever. (She chooses to ignore that she’s thought about Vision and tired herself out until ultimately falling asleep on top of her vibrator for the last four nights. Not relevant.)

Wanda’s thinking about how skilled he was with his tongue and wondering how proficient he might be at using it elsewhere. She’s close. At least thinking about him is efficient. It usually takes her way longer to get herself off.

“Vision,” she breathes out (involuntarily), approaching the cliff at full speed until her vibrator just fucking dies. God, she doesn’t usually need to charge it that much because she doesn’t use it that much. Until this week, at least.

Until Vision.

Well fuck. Now she’s crying. It’s absolutely just sexual frustration, Wanda insists, but really she’s crying because, more than anything, she wants to kiss his cheek. She wants to hold his hand. She imagines he’d say something so warm and sweet right now, whisper something about never wanting to disappoint her, promise that he’ll take care of her, that he wants her to feel good—all things that fill something entirely unrelated to her libido.

And suddenly, Wanda realizes that she’s absolutely fucked.

***

On her morning walk through the garden, Wanda holds Vision’s glasses cloth in her hands. It’s so silly, the things she holds onto in his absence. (Does something first need to be hers in order to become absent?)

She inspects the tree nursery to make sure they all have enough water. Her family has taken great care to propagate all of the remaining species of native trees, since so much of the land was scorched in the war. It feels strange to her to have a bright side sometimes, but Wanda really is grateful for the sustainability efforts established in Krakoa. They all contribute to cultivating the community’s crops and livestock, there’s a much clearer conscience about resource consumption, and, hell, Wanda’s even gotten into collecting the fibers for her own painting canvases, which—-

Wait.

Wanda pauses and pulls the white cloth from her pocket again, this time examining it more closely in the light. It feels different in her hands than any other fabric she’s felt since before the war. It’s oddly stretchy and a little too smooth. She thought that was because of the sentimental attachment, but she’s beginning to think it might belong to the time before the war.

Which is… weird. To her knowledge, there aren’t any unincorporated communities on the continent. And though it’s certainly possible that this is just something Vision has had for a long time, it seems unlikely that someone would carry an artifact like that around so casually.

Well, this man is already making her absolutely lose it. She might as well do some investigating.

After lunch, Wanda ventures into town to meet Agatha in the archives. She keeps all kinds of old things and seems likely to at least have some sort of answer.

Agatha is deep into an old looking book when Wanda finds her in the back stacks of the library. She looks up and grins.

“I don’t usually see you here.”

“Yeah,” Wanda shrugs, sitting beside her. “I worry about ruining the fancy old books.”

“Ha! Unlikely, but I respect the concern. What brings you here now?”

“Well, as much as I’d love to say that I’m just visiting a dear friend, I do actually have a question for you about something absurd.”

“Hit me.”

“It’s a long story, but someone gave me this recently and I might just be making it up, but… the material seems weird, I think. And I know you got into book binding for a little while, so…”

Wanda hands Agatha the cloth, which she stares at intently. She tugs at it, crinkles it, smooths it back out.

“Fascinating,” Agatha muses. “This has polyester. Krakoa abandoned plastics immediately upon incorporation.”

“That’s what I thought! Is it… do people still have random polyester fabrics like this?”

“I mean, most of them are in museums or science labs now! It’s immensely weird to just carry something like this around.”

“Is there anywhere we still make it?”

“No,” Agatha shakes her head. “But… there is a rumor about an abandoned oil refinery out in the deep forest.”

“What?! I thought those were all dismantled.”

“Probably not,” she shrugs. “Or it’s an urban legend. I dunno.”

“Huh.”

For years, Wanda has believed that all of the pre-war oil and coal plants were entirely dismantled in an effort to keep rogue agents from restarting them. But an abandoned oil refinery piques Wanda’s interest for a bunch of reasons, and at least one of them has to do with a missing handsome stranger. (Or, like, she’ll find a bunch of government secrets. Either way.)

***

Getting to the far corners of the forest is pretty easy for Wanda, given that she has literal magic powers. The difficult part is preparing for what threats the wilderness might conceal. After the villages on the outskirts of the city, she portals miles and miles into a depth where the forest is all but uninhabited.

Or, Wanda thinks they’re uninhabited, but a warm yellow glow begs to differ. She approaches a soft light just beyond the thick band of trees ahead of her. As it comes into focus, she can clearly make out a small cluster of modest houses, adorned with overflowing window gardens and painted murals on every wall. It’s gorgeous.

So gorgeous that she forgets her own presence, until a cold hand falls on her shoulder. Wanda shrieks and the stranger’s grip tightens, holding her firmly in place so that she can’t run away. Heart racing, she looks around frantically to try to catch a glimpse of her opponent. She swears she sees a flash of metallic silver, but she quickly dismisses that thought.

“Why are you here?”

The voice behind her is low and mechanical. Wanda startles. This is impossible. Is that…?

“I’m looking for somebody,” she says, trying to tame the tremble in her voice. “Who are you?”

“Victor the Sixth,” the voice responds. “And who are you?”

She settles on telling the truth, because this is absolutely unreal and she needs something to ground herself.

“Wanda Maximoff. I’m from Krakoa.”

“You are Wanda Maximoff?”

“Yes,” she nods with a deep breath. “Yeah. Do you… know of me?”

“Certainly,” Victor replies. He lets her go and moves to stand in front of her. Wanda tries not to stare or gasp at the robot’s metallic form and eerie stoic expression. She can tell Victor is doing the same examination.

“Yes,” Victor nods, finally. “Follow me.”

Heart still pounding, Wanda falls behind Victor as he leads her though the small neighborhood. At first, it had looked like a haphazard cluster of houses, but on closer examination, Wanda notices that the whole town is laid out in perfect concentric circles. Two circles of houses followed by one circle of what seem to be storefronts, which makes her do a bit of a double take. What could robots possibly need from a store? None of them have written labels, either, so she can’t make sense of what they contain, only that they don’t look like houses.

They pass a fourth and fifth row of houses and finally approach a central structure that looks something like a gazebo, with rocky pathways converging like spokes on a bicycle wheel. Huh.

Victor takes a sharp left turn and skips onto a different rock, and Wanda is pretty sure she hears him chuckle. It’s fascinating. She spent her whole life believing that robots weren’t capable of emotion or culture-building, but everything about this place says otherwise.

Wanda is so entranced that she nearly runs into Victor when he stops in front of a small blue house. She tilts her head to the side, examining the carefully painted exterior. It’s abstract, but something about it still clearly feels calm. She’s smiling when Victor knocks on the door, and she’s still smiling when a bright red man opens it.

If it’s possible for him to go pale, he does. Wanda doesn’t hesitate—he looks so familiar, even without the human skin and hair.

“Vision?”

“Wanda,” he replies, eyes wide. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“Looking for you, obviously!”

“You shouldn’t be here.”

The comment stings, but what’s worse is the way he’s looking at her, his mouth pressed to a flat line and his jaw tense.

“If you didn’t want me tracking you down, you shouldn’t have promised to come back to see me!”

“This seems… personal, so I’m going to go,” Victor cuts in. “Have a good night, brother.”

“You as well,” Vision nods, his face and voice softening for a moment to bid his brother goodnight. Brother? How literal is that? Do robots have siblings? And why does Vision look so different? And why the fuck is Wanda more concerned with finding Vision than she is with finding out he’s living in a secret robot village? All of this is crazy.

“I suppose you should come inside,” Vision sighs. “If you want to, of course.”

“Obviously I want that,” Wanda rolls her eyes. Vision moves to the side and Wanda walks into his home, which has colorful walls, lots of plants, and a soft looking, L-shaped, yellow couch in the corner.

“I’d offer you something to eat, but, uh… we’re not really built for human visitors,” he winces.

“It’s fine,” she replies. “Can I sit?”

“By all means.”

Wanda practically falls onto his couch (which is every bit as comfortable as it looks). Vision sits on the opposite end, and she can’t help but wonder why he’s so far away. Does he even want her here? (Of course not. That’s why he ran away. Ugh. Why is she doing this?)

“Um… so, uh, you left your glasses wipe, and… this is so stupid, but it’s polyester and there’s a rumor of an oil refinery out here and… that’s, um, not the important part, I don’t think.”

“We dismantled the refineries outside of Krakoa’s borders. We’ve just kept all of the pre-war fabrics we could. I hope that answers your question.”

“That’s not the question.”

Vision just raises an eyebrow in response. Or, uh, the muscle where his eyebrow would be, if he had one. Is it a muscle? Does he have those? (And, uh, has she been fantasizing about him correctly? The, um… she forces herself not to steal a glance between his legs.)

“I was looking for you, Vision. I admittedly didn’t expect all of this, but… I don’t know. It sounds stupid because we really only spent one night together, but I wanted another one and for some reason, I thought you did, too.”

“I did,” Vision says, quietly and softly as his expression warms. “I do.”

“Then why didn’t you come to see me? Why did you leave without even telling me you wish you could’ve stayed?”

“Because I’m not supposed to exist. I went to that party to check the status of the humans, to see if maybe they’d be ready for formal contact from us, but… you’re all still celebrating our annihilation. And I never should’ve flirted with you in the first place, since it’s impossible to ever be anything more than that one evening.”

“God, I’m sorry, Vision. That must’ve been so hard for you.”

“I was prepared for Krakoa to be politically difficult for me. I wasn’t prepared to meet you, though.”

“Why didn’t you even come say goodnight?”

“I shouldn’t have even kissed you, Wanda. Not without telling you who I really am, and I couldn’t tell you that, so I certainly couldn’t go and do anything more than I’d already done. That would’ve been on the basis of a lie, which you cannot truly consent to. Besides, I’d have been even more heartbroken to leave.”

More, she repeats in her head. Alright. So he’s got… something. Wanda caves in and looks down, but he’s got a pillow on his lap. Convenient. Hm.

Right. Okay. Wanda reminds herself to stop being horny for him, because, like, there’s a lot happening right now.

“Well… who are you really?”

“I’m Vision,” he nods. “I’m the first and only synthezoid. The androids out here built me as a bridge to humankind, since I can make myself blend in, and… oh, shit, do you want me to change to my human form? This must be so jarring for you and I don’t want—”

“Stay like this,” she replies quickly. Vision looks surprised, but she means it.

“Alright. Well, that’s… about everything.”

“How old are you? Have you always looked like this? Were you born here? Were you born? Is that invasive?”

“Curious,” he chuckles. “I was built 10 years ago, but in my current form. I don’t believe my age maps onto human experience, really, so… I’m certainly an adult. I was created here in a cradle, but I was not “born” in the human sense. That is invasive, but I suppose I’m open to sharing with you, seeing that I’ve already exposed many secrets to you tonight.”

“Wow,” Wanda grins. “That’s… so cool.”

“So you’re not terrified?”

“Not at all,” she shakes her head. “This is incredible, Vision. I mean, a whole village of peaceful androids? That could change the world.”

“We don’t want to change the world. We’d simply like to live in it.”

“I’m sure.”

“Humankind does not seem ready for that.”

“Not yet, but I think that can be changed.”

“Perhaps, but perhaps not. Which is why I cannot in good conscience allow this to continue any further, seeing that you are the heir to Krakoa.”

“Oh, please. Let me pick my own battles.”

“Oh?”

“I’m fine at keeping secrets, dude. And I’m able to push my dads to prepare for reunification, if you want that. Or we can just see each other again without any of that. I dunno, but I want to at least try.”

Vision’s face tilts and his expression is a little confusing, but seems to fall somewhere between surprised, curious, and happy. Wanda’s not sure what comes next.

“Are you certain?”

“Obviously,” she rolls her eyes. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Well, yes, but I suspect you weren’t anticipating finding out that I’m a synthezoid.”

“I find this to be a much better explanation than, like, you thought I was a terrible kisser and ran away.”

“Quite the opposite,” Vision smiles.

“Oh, thank god,” Wanda sighs and laughs.

“Truthfully, I’m quite flattered that you came looking for me, even if it is geopolitically… dangerous.”

“Ugh, I’ll gladly choose you over geopolitics. Besides, I’m down for a little danger,” Wanda winks.