#scarvis

Vision’s fingers stroke softly against her cheek, brushing away the tears still streaming down them in earnest. His clumsy, hesitant touch reminds her now of their earliest days, long before he’d begun to pick up on the human subtleties of affection. But, what it lacks in nuance, it makes up for in its tenderness. Wanda welcomes it all the same, reaching up a hand to hold him in place as she leans into his pal — and, just like that, she’s found her home again.

It’s a reminder of sorts, that touch — a reminder that he has spent just as much time alone in the world as she has. And while Wanda has her doubts regarding whether or not she deserves the future rapidly unfolding before them, she cannot deny that small, hopeful part of her that yearns to begin making up for lost time.

“Wanda, darling—“ The word cuts itself off on his lips just a moment too soon, prompting Wanda to pull back slightly from their embrace, her concern writing itself into the lines of her expression. It’s only when she meets Vision’s gaze and catches the fearful uncertainty flickering behind his eyes that realization strikes her with all the force of a gunshot. 

He’s waiting for rebuke, for horror — for rejection.

Black, corrosive anger rises sharply in the back of her throat, burning there like bile as her fingernails dig themselves into the soft alloy of her husband’s skin. In that long, awful moment, there is nothing Wanda wants more than to hunt down Hayward and every last one of his men, to tear them all apart, atom by atom, and reconstruct them anew, just so they could have a taste of the suffering they’d inflicted upon the man she loved.

Chthon’s Scarlet Witch would have sought her bloody revenge without a second’s thought. But, even through the seething storm of her own rage, Wanda Maximoff knows that she would rather die before seeing herself become what the Darkhold had made her again. This anger is her own — all the more reason why she cannot allow it to poison her.