Cruel Vengeance

New York City

June 2012

“Wanda?”

Wanda took her iced coffee from the barista with a smile. The barista smiled back, already turning away, and then froze halfway between Wanda and the coffee machine.

“Wanda… Maximoff?”

Wanda sighed internally. She’d deliberately put her hair up in a ponytail underneath a baseball cap, and worn plain jeans and a T-shirt, in the hopes that this wouldn’t happen. Again. “Yes…”

“Oh my God,” the girl said, beaming. Wanda was still pissed that this was even happening, but at least it was a positive reaction this time. It tended to be a toss-up between people who loved her and wanted a selfie, and people who hated her and wanted her either dead or in prison. “Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m talking to the Scarlet Witch—”

Wanda smiled reluctantly. “I like caffeine as much as the next person,” she said.

“Who doesn’t?” the girl agreed, and blushed a little. “I—um, can I get a picture with you?”

Sigh. “Of course.”

Wanda accepted the girl’s cell phone and turned around, snapping a quick picture of the two of them. Her own smile looked forced, but the girl’s was huge and incandescent.

“Wanda-ah.”

Wanda handed the phone back to the barista, picked up Vision’s coffee, and handed it to him as he stepped through the exterior wall of the building and appeared right behind her. “Vis, don’t do that in public places,” she said. “We’ve talked about this.”

“There were people…” Vision gestured at the crowd of people on their lunch break who were packing the Starbucks between the door and the pickup counter. All of whom were dead silent with expressions running the gamut from shocked to awed to furious to terrified. “It seemed easier.”

Wanda grinned at him, took his arm, and steered him towards the exit door.

“Have a nice day!” the barista called after them.

“Thanks, you too!” Wanda said with a lot more cheer than she felt, and shoved the door open.

Vision sipped his coffee and studied her anxiously. “I did not intend to make things difficult for you.”

“You didn’t,” Wanda said. “Or… it was already difficult, you phasing through the wall didn’t really make a difference.”

Vision nodded slowly. “I have received word from the new compound. The first group of young enhanced will be joining us in two days.”

“We’re not ready—”

“It will be fine,” Vision said. “The rooms are nearly finished.”

“How many in the first group?”

“Eleven have been deemed stable enough in their powers to attempt a normal life.”

“Eleven,” Wanda said. Imagining it. Eleven kids, teenage or younger. All enhanced. All of them… like her, in some fundamental way.

Vision didn’t smile, but she could tell he took pleasure in her tentative excitement. It was written in the softening of his eyes and spread like a sash of stars across what she could feel of his (incredible, unique, fathomless) mind. Which wasn’t much, because she really tried to stay out of people’s heads unless she had a reason. But she usually maintained a low level of awareness of the people around her, and she gleaned information from it—moods, intentions, a rough idea of where their attention was focused, position in relation to herself. And when Vision was around, it was so easy to let what she could sense of him override every other perception she had. His mind was so different.

With effort, she tore her focus back to the world around her.

“Wanda,” Vision said suddenly. “I have been studying humanity for some time now, and your species quite clearly have a social drive for companionship.”

Wanda looked at him sideways, sipping her iced latte. “Mhm…” She knew Clint or Pietro would say something sarcastic like How groundbreaking or Pretty sure we’ve known that for like a couple hundred years but she couldn’t bring herself to. She could feel his uncertainty, and how hard he was trying.

 “And some forms of companionship are different from others.”

“Yes.” Wanda’s heart was beating a little faster than usual. She thought she knew where he was going with this, but couldn’t bring herself to help him out—if she was wrong, it would be catastrophically awkward.

Vision studied his coffee intently. He seemed oblivious to the stares he earned as they walked along the sidewalk. They earned a few glares from a man in the door of a pizza parlor across the street; Wanda glared back and curled a bit of power across his mind, reaching just so for the things that caused this man fear and pain. She got a flash of something involving spiders. It was enough to make him flinch and look away, even though she paid attention long enough to make sure he didn’t connect it with her.

Seemed as though the true extent of her powers had stayed a secret. Good news.

“It occurs to me that I am… human enough to also desire companionship,” he said.

Wanda elbowed him lightly. “Then it’s a good thing you found a group of people so weird that you and your red-and-silver skin and Infinity stone fit right in, isn’t it?”

“A good thing,” Vision agreed. “I am grateful for the Avengers’ acceptance—”

Wanda bit back a smile, unsuccessfully. “It was a joke.”

“Ah.” Vision took a breath. “I am trying to say that… there are other forms of companionship beyond… friendship, that humans want. And that, evidently, I do as well.”

“So something romantic,” Wanda said, losing the battle with her smile. Vision glanced over and looked momentarily stunned. “Is that where you’re headed with this?”

“I… suppose that would not be an inaccurate assessment,” Vision said, tentative hope glimmering across his mind.

Wanda opened her mouth to answer, and then she had a better idea.

Cautiously, she reached out and opened her mind to his.

Vision stopped dead. She turned to face him so they were on the edge of the sidewalk, not blocking people’s paths too much, and barely noticed that their free hands had found one another, fingers twining, because his mind—

Oh, his mind.

It was the first time she’d touched it, really truly let herself fall since Hydra had dragged hapless victims for her to practice on. And Vision was so different. He sensed her presence as more than a nightmare. He matched her. The stunning, soaring architecture of his consciousness pulsed with power and held its nightmares outside of her grasp, and for the first time Wanda knew what it was to be in another’s mind and find only peace instead of fear.

He welcomed her presence. He was order where every other consciousness she’d ever touched had been chaos. Not as structured as a machine, not as strange as normal humans. Entrancing.

So she opened herself to him in return, let him feel her cautious joy, her genuine pleasure and hope.

A question—not even a question, but the essence of a query, passed from him to her, limned with wonder and delight.

Yes, she sent back in a rush of feeling that was acceptance, happiness, purest joy. And hope. Always hope.

For a brighter future.

And then he took a deep (unnecessary) breath and showed her a piece of knowledge that left her reeling.

Wanda felt her shock resonate through her mind in slow motion like food coloring dropped into water, and then it bled back over and the remnants echoed in Vision’s own thoughts.

She didn’t ask if he was sure, because she felt his surety in the knowledge along with everything else. She studied it, his perception, saw her own mind through the sense the mind-stone gave him. The power. The energy rippling through it, warping it beyond what any human mind was ever meant to be, and seeping out into every inch of her body to keep all of her in tune with what her mind had become.

“I’m immortal,” she whispered. To make it true, to make it real.

Vision watched her carefully; she could feel his hesitation.

Wanda processed this information. Still not entirely disengaged from the mental contact.

“Are you angry?” Vision said softly.

“No,” Wanda murmured. “No, I—it’s just… a lot.” She thought of—outlasting them. Darcy, Sam, Sharon, Tony, Bruce, Jane, Helen, Clint, Maria. They were all her friends, her adopted extended family, and if none of them was killed in action, she would one day see them all die. Even Natasha and Steve and Bucky, with their decelerated aging, would still one day grow gray hairs and wrinkles and eventually their mortality would catch up to them.

And Pietro… Wanda’s thoughts shied away from that idea.

She found herself wanting to talk to Loki.

“We’ll figure it out,” she said, and offered Vision a smile, wobbly but true. “Did you just… just figure this out?”

“I saw it,” Vision said softly. “I’ve never… I cannot simply reach out into another’s mind the way you can, I know not why. Machines, yes, but not humans. You must initiate the contact before I can truly scan the energy the mind-stone gave you and how it is impacting your body.”

Wanda nodded slowly. “…dinner? Tomorrow night?”

“I believe we’ve already exhausted most of what I understand to be typical ‘first date’ topics of conversation,” Vision said. He looked down at their joined hands, still held up between their bodies, and tugged on her fingers almost like he’d never seen other hands before. Leading her down the sidewalk, a faint, humming bond remaining between their minds that Wanda couldn’t bring herself to close. She knew Vision could’ve shut her out, too, but he didn’t. “Questions such as where do you work, and so forth.”

“Well,” Wanda said, unable to completely erase a little smile from her lips. Deciding as she walked that immortality, eternity, wouldn’t be difficult to bear if she had a friend such as Vision at her side. In the biggest irony of her life, Vision more than anyone else reminded her what it was to be human. “We can always laugh about the strange looks the waiters will give us.”

“I shall refrain from walking through walls,” Vision said.

Wanda squeezed his hand and enjoyed the warmth of the sunlight on her face. “Perhaps one wall. As long as I’m on the other side, so I can see everyone’s faces.”