If This Is Love

The Vision is a strange name for me, an AI who cannot see anything ahead but a bleak, empty future. A future with no Wanda Maximoff.

  Images flash unbidden to my mind, a mind usually so logical and rational. A mind that would for any other human being in the nine realms accept this as a necessary and suitable sacrifice, but somehow can't quite seem to compute that. The overwhelming grief in what should be an emotionless robot.

  The first is not even something I ever saw, but a photograph once shown to me. Filed away and stored for this moment. It's from a long time ago, before the bomb that changed the Maximoffs' lives, before everything. A girl barely recognizable in expression from the woman I knew, laughing and carefree, smiling at whoever's taking the picture. Her brother, Pietro, perched on the arm of the armchair she's sitting in, glancing down at her and laughing too, frozen in that moment forever. She's leaning against him slightly in the way you could lean against someone who you trust to catch you when you fall.

  The next, her powers. So gloriously beautiful, this mental image. Her stunning eyes focussed and confident, her brown hair swept up in her movement, the red magic of chaos itself swirling around her hands like a scarlet stormcloud. Wanda's powers were so great, with such infinite potential, and they suited the woman who was all chaos and fire.

  A third to remind me that fire is not always a roaring inferno. Fire can be a candle, easily snuffed out, but if you knock it over it can set everything you know and love ablaze. This is Wanda knocked over. Screaming and crying, collapsed to her knees with the excruciating pain of her brother gone. The one she could trust with everything, the one who she could confidently give her entire life and he would look after it no matter the cost. So close to her they were part of one and half of Wanda Maximoff was dead and gone, riddled with bullets and lying cold and still on the street.

And fourth the first time she smiled since Pietro. Everyone's efforts had failed; even those worst hit by her magic, showing them illusions of their darkest, deepest nightmares, had tried to help. Nothing had worked. Nothing had made her happy, made her laugh, smile. And I held her in my arms and lifted her into the midnight sky and let her cry but didn't let her fall. And when I set her back down on the rooftop, she smiled at me; not a radiant, glowing smile but a weak, gentle smile. Not the smile of a woman whose brokenness had been fixed, but that of one who had a possibility - just a possibility - that one day her brokenness might be.

  It was so long. So long and so difficult, stopping the tears and replacing them with laughter. Even with all of us working as a team, as a family. Sometimes I considered giving up, but I know now I could never and that is was worth the struggle. I know now that her real smiles are rays of sunlight in a grey world and her laughter is music in the place of sorrow.

  I want now more than anything to see that smile and hear that laughter just one more time.

  When I was created, I had no standard of beauty in my mind. I had no way to judge whether a woman was attractive or not, no way to tell. They looked like this or that but it was all the same to me. But my AI learned, slowly, gradually, and for my standard of beauty I had Wanda. And therefore, literally, no woman can ever be as or more beautiful than the Scarlet Witch.

  I loved that name. Loved being a strange word for an android to use but it was too true to exchange it for another. She hated it; told me once that witches were evil and she was not. But to me it spoke of her magic and her chaos and her fire, and the softer sounding name, Wanda, that was her gentleness and her brokenness and her sweetness.

  I say I had no standard of beauty; I also had no standard of perfection. So I chose Wanda, the best I knew. In every way, none can ever be as perfect as Wanda.

  Wanda who I loved. I told her once, and she told me she loved me too. So-called "Avengers Movie Night" and everyone else fallen asleep or gone home. And even though I know it cannot be true, that this woman, so alive, so grandly human, could never truly love an android, I also know that my beloved Wanda would never lie. That was another great aspect of her; she never lied. Her honour and her word were precious and fragile things to her that could and should never be broken.

I hated her brother sometimes. Again, a strange word for an AI to use, but not as strange - hate is not so powerful or human an emotion as love is. For leaving her. For leaving her so broken that it took nearly two years to fix her, and even then you can still see every last crack. For rating Hawkeye's life above his, when his life was a part of Wanda's. How could he be so foolish? Risk his sister like that? Did he not know?

And now this.

  An ordinary mission like any other. Expected to have no problems. We had no intel at all on their new weapons. Armour impervious to Wanda's magic. And they just ran up and shot her and now Wanda Maximoff is dying, dying, dead and I feel so alone and empty and broken in a way I never thought possible.

  If I had tear ducts built into my design, I would be crying. I thought that that was a pointless part of a human's anatomy, that it was unnecessary and pointless, but now I long for it as a release of my grief. In the same way, I used to wish for the emotions that made the others so human and made me stand out so clearly. The love and the hatred. But now...

  If this is hate, what I feel for these agents of Hydra, then I do not want it. I can hear the muffled poundings of the feet of the others, the sound of Stark's Iron Man suit as it soars towards us - me. Because there is only one of us here now. And I wish beyond anything that it was the other way around. I can feel their stares as they take in the sheer brutality of the melted, twisted mess of what is left of those agents after my rage.

  If this is love, what I feel for Wanda Maximoff, then I do not want it either. How do humans live? What I had admired and wondered at I now pity beyond belief. How do they survive love and loss when they love and are loved and lose and are lost so agonizingly easily?

  Now I feel the grief as the others,  too, realise. They run over, crouch by my side as I hold her limp body in my arms, offer consoling words that taste bitter in the mouth and cry which makes me envy them.

  I kiss her, as I have before, but she's cold and unresponsive. Already long, long gone. And now nothing and no-one can bring her back to me.

  If this is love, I wish I had never loved, that I could have the slightest lessening of this agony.