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“Why are you here?” Wanda asks, quiet and unsure as her voice finally breaks the silence that had fallen upon Agatha’s departure from the room, a sleeping Irena at her hip. She doesn’t look at Vision, choosing instead to stare down at her hands where they’re clasped in her lap. Blue eyes are upon her though, and her skin prickles with a sense of unease.

“I wanted to see you,” he answers simply, “to make sure you’re okay.”

She lifts her head, forces herself to look Vision in the eye. “Why would I not be okay?”

He inclines his head in her direction. “I just wish to know that you are in this relationship because you want to be.”

She squints suspiciously at him, lines appearing in the pale skin around her eyes and lips. “Why would I be involved with Agatha if I didn’t want to be?”

“She is a woman of great power and intelligence, yet . . .” he hesitates as he searches for the words that most accurately encompass his misgivings about Agatha. “She’s less than morally sound,” he eventually settles upon.

“So?”

“I do not wish for you to get hurt, that is all.”

“We’ve been together for nearly five years, Vis. Do you not think that she would have hurt me by now, if it was going to happen at all?”

“Perhaps, perhaps not. You can never be a hundred percent sure of anyone’s intentions but your own.”

“But - five years and a child, Vision.”

“She is over three hundred and fifty years old, Wanda. Five years is likely little more than the blink of an eye for her. As for Irena,” he pauses, recalling how Agatha had interacted with the infant with a tenderness that he’d never really thought her capable of possessing. “She appears to care for her, though I do not know if I would call it love.”

Wanda’s nostrils flare as anger pools, hot and molten, in her belly as she pushes herself up onto her feet. “I don’t care whether you approve of us or not,” she spits out, looming over him in such a way that would be intimidating if he didn’t know that she wouldn’t do anything to him, not with the children sleeping soundly upstairs. “But I will not - I repeat, I will not - have you questioning her devotion to our daughter.”

He dips his head, hopes she takes it as a show of submission. That’s not it is, of course, but that doesn’t mean he can’t try and present it to her in that way. She eyes him suspiciously, her lips pressed into pale, thin lines. Her fingers flex at her sides, quick and fast and agitated in their movements.

“You need to leave.”

“Alright,” he concedes, standing slowly from the sofa. He fixes his eyes upon hers, declares, “but don’t think that this is over.”

“Oh, contrare,” she retorts with an almost psychotic smile that shows a few too many teeth for it to be anything other than a visible threat. “I think you’ll find that it is.”

This, Vision thinks as Wanda shows him to the door, is what fear feels like.

Agatha’s already in bed by the time Wanda makes it upstairs.

She places the baby monitor that she’s brought up from the living room down onto her bedside table and sets about making quick work of her evening routine. The mattress dips beneath her as she climbs between the sheets and sinks down into the cushion-like material, relishing in the way that the warmth of Agatha’s body has already begun to permeate the sheets.

Agatha rolls over to face her, reaching out a hand to rest atop Wanda’s hip. “Thank you for defending me,” she whispers. “I know it must be hard for you.”

Wanda smiles at her through the darkness, brushes a stray strand of black hair back from Agatha’s face. Creamy skin feels soft and smooth against her palm as she cups Agatha’s wide, square jaw and begins to trace the curve of full, round cheeks. “Why would it be hard for me?” she asks, “I love you, and I’m not just going to let someone tear you down for no real reason.”

Agatha smiles back, but it’s uncertain and small. “You used to love him too,” she says quietly, “and I’m sure that there are many people out there that would agree with him.”
Wanda’s hand stills, and she pulls away, propping herself up on her elbow. Agatha’s hand slides from her hip as she moves, and she feels the loss of both its warmth and its weight immediately. “Is something wrong? It’s not like you to be like this.”

She sees Agatha’s teeth flash in the shaft of moonlight that slips in through a tiny gap in the curtains covering the window at the end of the bed. The white-grey light casts some illumination across Agatha’s face, illuminating the way that she’s biting down on her bottom lip, her eyes wide with fear and anxiety as she stares up at Wanda for the briefest of moments. It doesn’t last, and dark eyes are turning away from her, forced down towards the sheets that cover the mattress beneath them. “I . . . it’s silly.”

“What is it?”

Faintly crooked teeth scratch over broken skin as she lets out a hushed, rasping breath. “Having Vision around, it scares me,” she admits, shame burning its way through her body. “What if you decide you don’t love me anymore?”

Wanda blinks, and lies back down. “You’re insecure?”

“I suppose so.”

“But, why? You’re the one that I want.”

“Vision wasn’t an option before, though,” she counters.

Wanda’s heart sinks. “You think I chose you because you were the only choice?”

Dark eyes finally rise, meeting Wanda’s gaze as a wet, watery sheen colours grey irises bright in the moonlight as tears threaten to fall. “W-would you tell me if you had?” she rasps, “you’d tell me if you didn’t want me anymore?”